Kansas-born ballet dancer Trey McIntyre started his career as a popular freelance choreographer working for prestigious American and European ballet companies. In 2004, he founded the Trey McIntyre Project, a 10-member touring company whose “fresh and forward-thinking choreography” [Washington Post] was an immediate sensation with both critics and audiences alike. TMP started partly in reaction to an anxiety suffusing ballet, and partly as a rejection of a widespread business-over-art approach. “There’s a lot of feelings of poverty, struggle, adversity,” Mr. McIntyre explains. “ ‘Oh, too bad this can’t happen.’ But then people continue to do things the old way. I’m not saying we have all the answers, but we’re questioning everything: Why are we here? Why does dance exist in America?”

Trey McIntyre will present his new ballet about global warming, The Sun Road, at Glacier National Park in the summer of 2009, a performance dealing with the micro and the macro — a dancer changing space but also in the big picture, mankind’s overall effect on the planet. The approach is certainly innovative, if not groundbreaking. Roberto Bolle is all ears.

Redhead angel John Michael Schert [above] is the executive director of the Trey McIntyre Project. Hit the gallery for more aerial portraits of TMP’s male dancers by Jonas Lundqvist.

Trey McIntyre Project
Jonas Lundqvist
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