The Sweeter End

REVIEWS

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

“In the 9-month-old “The Sweeter End,” the 10 members of the Trey McIntyre Project performed with devastating sharpness a breathless, engulfing, high-speed amalgam of ballet steps, gymnastic feats, ballroom fragments and eruptions of snake-hips undulation. And it always flowed, always swung. By itself, John Michael Schert’s extraordinary solo to “Ol’ Man Mose” showed you a linear ballet body suddenly fractured, melted down, reintegrated and reconstituted as a futuristic prototype ready for anything. And the two contrasting arrangements of “St. James Infirmary” (one weighty and dirge-like, the other explosively propulsive) found McIntyre’s forces not so much dancing to the music as developing a daring, virtuosic dialogue with it. Meanwhile the band played on, sometimes deferring to the dancers by providing spare drum-and-hand-clap accompaniment, but elsewhere challenging any dancer anywhere to match the spirit and cohesion of its super, über-Dixieland musicianship. But the wow factor of McIntyre’s choreography never faltered, so the evening sustained the sense of an ideal collaboration and proved again that there is indeed such a thing as genuine 21st century ballet, and it belongs more to this guy from Wichita than any of the over-hyped pretenders from England, France or Russia. McIntyre rocks, McIntyre rules. Everyone else can just get in line.”

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“The robust muscularity of McIntyre’s freewheeling choreography was at its invigorating best in “The Sweeter End,” a 2011 collaborative effort with New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band.”