Peter Lattu

Our Trip to See the Trey McIntyre Project

Saturday night we were off to see a dance performance by the Trey McIntyre Project at the Sidney Harman Hall across from the Verizon Center. We hopped the Metro at Huntington.

There was an intriguing crowd on the subway into the city that night… a man in a kilt with a frame backpack… a woman in a long celery green formal evening gown with bare shoulders listening to her iPod… an older man in jeans and an indigo kimono top in a wheelchair reading a small book… a blonde woman dressed in black and white with a gift bag writing her card on the way to a party… two young women resting their boots on the handicapped seat… a woman way behind us coughing… all this on our train ride to Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter.

Emerging from the Metro, we walked past the Navy Memorial with pleasant memories of its summer concerts. Regrettably, the Navy Memorial Visitors’ Center itself no longer displays changing daily reminders of events of the day in Navy and Marine Corps history. We used to enjoy reading those historic reminders as we walked by its window. But tonight a red carpet was out for a film showing at the Center – an inviting touch.

On the way to Harman Hall we noticed the packed restaurants and bars. Lots of people were walking along the sidewalks, including a couple pushing a baby and a small white dog in a stroller. A woman in very high heels walked into the street to avoid the grate.

The performance consisted of three dances: Ma Maison, In Dreams, and The Sweeter End, all created by Trey McIntyre in the past several years. Ma Maison featured eight dancers in death’s head masks with recorded music by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Sister Gertrude Morgan. There was a bit of vaudeville and a sequence channeling the Roaring Twenties with an ecstatic Charleston. The death’s head masks reminded us of how death is a part of life even in present pleasure, like a New Orleans jazz funeral. At one point the dancers formed a chain of death as in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. A hint of plagues and coffle gangs was there in that chain of dancers.

In Dreams, set to recorded music by Roy Orbison, was created for the Ballet Memphis in 2007. The Sweeter End brought us back to jazz with more recorded music by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The dancers were costumed in post-twentieth-century urban grunge. Sweat flew as they vamped exuberantly to jazz of yesterday.

The program did not have photographs of the dancers in the company so we could not tell who was who except for Jason Hartley, one of our favorites from his days with the Washington Ballet. His characteristic casual soaring lightness remains and we were happy to see that he is now assistant to the artistic director as well as one of the dancers.

Interestingly, this dance company makes its home in Boise, Idaho. All of the dancers are sponsored by someone, including several by people in Boise. Idaho is a long way from New York City, that fertile center of contemporary dance and ballet. However, Trey McIntyre’s company showed no sign of missing the big city. His dances are twenty-first century creations, chic and modern.

After the show, we stepped out into the street and into rain. Several people were wearing police badges with black bands. Later we heard on the radio that it was National Police Week with events downtown. There was track work between Pentagon City and Braddock Road, so our train took twenty-five minutes to appear at Gallery Place. On the way home was a woman wearing a silk kimono in circles of color on black with a purple obi. Back at Huntington, we got in our car and headed home after an exciting night out.

{Essay by Peter and Alison Lattu, May 18, 2011}