Dance - Trey McIntyre makes a move

Trey McIntyre makes ballets for the 21st century – daring, robust works that speak to the lives we live now. He invites a deeply personal and surprising experience; he wants audiences to be emotionally charged by movement. His eponymous company, Trey McIntyre Project, performs Sat., April 10 at the Rialto Center for the Arts.

McIntyre’s artistry unfolds in luscious movement phrases, punctuated with surprising shifts that give the work density and rich texture. The dancers move fluidly between athletic abandon and refined virtuosity. It’s as decisive and pristine as Merce Cunningham, with the sinew and slink of William Forsythe.

Artistic director and dancer John Michael Schert says, “The work is entertaining, but it’s more than a good time. Trey’s work asks that people emotionally participate.” Originally from Valdosta, Schert has performed with Trey McIntyre Project since its inception as a summer pick-up troupe in 2005. The company, now based in Boise, Idaho, continues to receive critical praise for its innovative work.

The Rialto Center production features three dances. In the evening’s short opener, “Shape,” a red balloon wobbles atop a dancer’s head, while another performer moves with similar orbs affixed to her palms. When stuffed into a T-shirt like enormous breasts, one wonders at the absurdity and oddity of the image: Is this woman a grotesque fetish or a majestic, malformed Barbie?

The subtler “Ten Pin Episodes” took shape after 200 bowling pins were unexpectedly donated to the company. McIntyre challenged himself to work them into a piece. Danced to Chopin’s preludes, the piece is melancholic in tone, restrained and lonely. Though the approach to the bowling pins is largely abstract, it’s easy to imagine them as diminutive human forms. The image is haunting: a tiny community, a target, continuously collapsing.

“Wild Sweet Love” is the evening’s exuberant closer, performed to a shuffle of iconic songs, from Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” to numbers by Queen, Lou Reed and Roberta Flack. Structured to loosely resemble a wedding ceremony, the piece centers on a woman as she explores the many shades of romantic love: unabashed, exultant, mysterious, tense, tender. McIntyre seems to embrace the cliché inherent in the set up (after all, isn’t a cliché just something that’s been loved too much?), and then transcend it with soaring and refreshingly honest choreography.