By Paul Horsley

When Trey McIntyre announced last year that he was all but disbanding his Boise-based dance troupe, which had been hailed as one of the most inventive American companies of the last quarter-century, the news caused considerable ripples in the dance world. Granted, the 10-member company was only one component of the Wichita native’s broad-ranging activities: The Trey McIntyre Project had from its inception included photography, writing and film, and it will continue to explore all aspects of visual and performing arts in the future. But the dance company, which performed Trey’s works almost exclusively, was the most visible part of the Project, and it will be sorely missed not just in Idaho and New York but everywhere. On May 22nd Kansas Citians are privileged to be a part of history, as the Harriman-Jewell Series brings Trey’s company to town as part of its valedictory tour. Having made an acclaimed debut on the Series in 2010, this time the group brings two new works designed specifically as a “send-off,” one (The Vinegar Works) based on the legacy of the late writer/illustrator Edward Gorey, the other (Mercury Half-Life) a tribute to Queen and its late lead singer Freddy Mercury.

It’s a fond farewell to the company that prickly Alastair Macaulay in The New York Times called “amazingly fresh, dancy, communicative.” He was one of a host of critics who hailed Trey’s style: “It’s refreshing to see a choreographer who, while showing a wide command of the ballet vocabulary, isn’t haunted by the idioms of Balanchine and doesn’t rely on high lifts or acrobatic extensions,” Alastair wrote. “There’s a fertility of invention and a modernity of spirit here that are all Mr. McIntyre’s own.”

But Trey emphasizes that he’s not really going away: In fact he’s planning to stay in Idaho, whose landscapes have provided him with continual inspiration. And in addition to choreographing for other companies (a number of which are yearning to work with him) he hopes to write, photograph, and create a series of both documentary and feature films. Dance will play a role, though that role is yet to be determined. “Internally, the shift is not so huge,” Trey said recently from his Boise home-base. “It is a big thing to not have a full-time dance company any more, but we’ve been working all along in these different mediums, and the only reason they have not been an external focus is because a dance company takes up everything.” With dance largely removed from TMP, things will look quite different, he says. “The dance company ended up taking all of our time and resources … and that’s one of the reasons we’re making that shift. …  I had to really carve out some room to be able to continue that.”

Setting up a company in Boise was a pretty daring venture to begin with. The native Midwesterner found himself in love with the arid, craggy and sometimes verdant landscapes that are just a few minutes’ drive from the city. And little Boise (pop. 213,000) embraced his New York-ish company with surprising vigor: It became a source of local pride that a world-renowned organization had chosen to settle there. “The people in this community have been so incredibly supportive, and so invested,” Trey says. Local reactions to the recent announcement have been pretty consistent, he says. “First, just sadness over losing something that’s really important to them. … But that is always followed up by a great understanding of this transition … and really an excitement about what’s coming next.”

Though his nomadic life as independent choreographer will take him all over the world in the future, Trey says he “never wants to spend another summer away from Boise.” The community has not just been supportive to his company, it has been a perfect fit for his temperament. “I’m from Kansas, as you know. It’s not the same as Kansas here, but there is a certain similar sensibility that people have here. It’s a very kind place. It’s a very slow pace. And you know, you can really stop anyone in the street and strike up a conversation and not feel weird. And I like that. Faster-paced life for me is very distracting, and it’s hard for me to have the kind of interior space to get the work done that I need to get done. It’s hard for me to work in large companies: I find I’m very distracted by … the strained focus. … Here I’ve been able to explore creatively in ways that I never would have been able to elsewhere.”

As his vistas expand, upcoming photographic exhibitions include a collaboration with the Sawtooth National Forest (in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act in 1964) and documentary films about the company’s history and about its work with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “Dance was the medium in which I had the opportunity to develop and use,” say Trey, who studied various subjects at North Carolina School of the Arts (and later at Houston Ballet Academy) and settled on dance initially because it’s where he first found work. “But I’m not particularly pulled in that direction, as opposed to other media. They all sort of converged as I developed as a kind of polymath. It’s more the point that I’m getting at rather than the way that I’m getting at it.”

The two works for this final tour are indicative of the complexity of Trey’s artistic sensibility. Gorey, he says, is an artist he’s long admired because his work “walks the line between adorable and ‘sick,’ in a really great way, and in a way that holds our hands and explores some of the darker regions of our own psyches.” For The Vinegar Works: Four Dances of Moral Instruction he has selected some of Gorey’s weirder tales and has engaged the designs of puppetmaster Michael Curry (with Dan Luce), who created Gorey-inspired puppets—all to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich (the Piano Quintet in G minor). “Gorey is definitely a surrealist, an absurdist, and there’s not a typical progression in these stories,” Trey says with a laugh. “Typically something bad happens, and then, ‘The End.’ Nobody learns anything, and there’s not a resolution to it. It’s delicious and fun.”

Mercury Half-Life, on the other hand, is a 50-minute tribute to music Trey’s older brother used to listen to, music that kids at his school in Wichita used to deem satanic. “They were talking about how Queen had all these backward messages hidden, and people got all freaked out about it. And it seemed real mysterious.” The piece includes more than a dozen Queen songs including “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” “We Are the Champions” and of course “We Will Rock You.” “I wanted to create a ‘closer,’ ” Trey says, “But I don’t like having an agenda for how an audience should feel, I just want to make the best, most honest work that I can, and then hope that they feel it.”

Trey McIntyre Project performs May 22nd at the Kauffman Center. Call 816-415-5025 or go to hjseries.org. For more information about the Project and its other activities see treymcintyre.com.

To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, find him at phorsley@sbcglobal.net or on Facebook.

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