A tall order for Trey McIntyre: choreographer sets Houston Ballet's Peter Pan.

TREY MCINTYRE IS FLYING HIGH THESE DAYS, AND FREQUENTLY. FOR MUCH OF THE PAST FOUR YEARS THE 32-YEAR-OLD CHOREOGRAPHER HAS BEEN FOLDING HIS 6'6" BODY INTO AIRPLANES, FLYING IN AND OUT OF PORTLAND, OREGON, his home base since 1998, staging his ballets and creating new works on companies coast to coast as well as in Chile, Russia, and other countries in Europe.

McIntyre's ballets tend to be richly textured, visually stimulating, high-energy works in which the classical vocabulary is used in idiosyncratic and expressive ways. His command of his craft, acute visual sense, and eclectic musical taste have made him so high in demand that he is, more often than not, working on several ballets at once.

Last spring, when he was deep in rehearsals of Michael Curry's Spirits, for which he was director of choreography and also "flew" as a performer, he was also staging the 1996 Second Before the Ground on three companies. It was performed in the same week by Moscow Classical Ballet, Houston Ballet, and Ballet Memphis. At the same time, he was immersed in planning his first evening-length story ballet, a new version of Peter Pan, which will premiere in Houston this month (March 14-24).

"It's crazy," he said late last summer before returning to Tennessee to create High Lonesome for Memphis. "But if I'm not doing it, I get depressed." He was still in Memphis on September 11 when the nation went into collective shock from terrorist attacks. He and the dancers, as artists did everywhere, stuck with the job at hand.

"Having a new work to create has been a huge blessing," McIntyre commented at the time. "I'm realizing that more and more, now that the piece is finished. I was able to have a few days when I didn't think about what happened because I had a responsibility to finish. Now that I've shifted from a less creative part of the rehearsal process, I'm finding it harder to remain distracted. The dancers have been amazing ... perhaps even more focused and creative than before."

That focus by dancers--and choreographer--paid off: High Lonesome was a smash hit, a work that, according to Memphis critic Christopher Blank, "knocks you out of your seat, sits you up, and knocks you down again [with] dancing that is a beautifully complex display of emotions."

Since then, with some time out to meet other commitments, McIntyre's creative focus has been directed toward the completion of Peter Pan, his most ambitious project to date. With a scenario based firmly on J.M. Barrie's 1911 novel, the three-act work can be characterized as a postmodern version of a traditional, classically oriented ballet, with the costumes, sets, multimedia visual effects, and music all directed toward serving a narrative that, unlike the Disney version or even the stage musical, is told in dance.

Visually, it is slated to be a knockout, with sets by Thomas Boyd, Houston Ballet's production director, and costumes designed by Jeanne Button. Sculptural engineer Curry is acting as a consultant to the production, contributing designs for giant prams and nine-foot-tall nannies for the first act, a huge crocodile, and a specially constructed glove built in Curry's studio in Saint Helen's, Oregon, to serve as Captain Hook's hook. McIntyre has worked with all three artists on past productions.

PETER PAN PREMIERES WHERE McIntyre's dance-making career began fourteen years ago, when as a student in the Houston Ballet Academy he caught the attention of Artistic Director Ben Stevenson with a choreographic exercise Stevenson said he never forgot: "I noticed his imagination and ability to home in on individual talents in a summer-program exercise. He took fifteen girls and had them as old-fashioned bathing beauties, and made them all look good. Trey understands dancers and he has an expressive, physical facility. If he had to, he could do a ballet on dancers with broken legs!" Stevenson created the position of choreographic apprentice for him in 1989, and in 1995 McIntyre became choreographic associate.

To date, McIntyre, who was born in Wichita, Kansas, where he attended an alternative school and studied piano for nine years, has done thirty-five ballets, none of them on dancers with broken legs. Yet. He does admit to being a problem-solving choreographer, with an interest in process that is more characteristic of choreographers working in the idiom of contemporary dance than the ballet vocabulary. "I like to set up a problem and solve a puzzle and that in the end probably becomes a story."

Out of that process has come an impressive range of ballets. Steel and Rain, created for the New York City Ballet's 1994 Diamond Project, when he was only 24, is an elegantly crafted, pure movement work, a sophisticated solution to maximizing the talents of NYCB's sleek and speedy dancers, which made the New York press sit up and take notice: "[It] has a theatrical power and meaning that none of the above-mentioned [Diamond Project choreographers] even approached, let alone achieved," Robert Greskovic wrote for The Native. Jennifer Dunning Called the work "zany [and] authoritative" in The New York Times.

Two years later, McIntyre was putting his wit and zaniness to work in the very different Second Before the Ground, a piece about first love that carries the same authority as Steel and is even better made. Costumes designed by McIntyre, a Kronos Quartet recording of Pieces of Africa, and lighting in which he undoubtedly had a hand also contribute to a work whose visual effect is as emotionally buoyant as the music and dance.

"I'm a student my whole life," McIntyre, who has the blond good looks of the American heartland and the inquiring mind of an urban intellectual, has said. "When I was growing up in Wichita, I actually studied stagecraft and spent a good deal of time as a stagehand--built sets, worked in a costume shop, did whatever I could to be in a theater. All of that early experience has paid off in understanding the mechanics of theater and my knowing what the possibilities and limitations are."

The 1999 Aliss in Wonderland, commissioned jointly by Fort Worth Dallas Ballet, Nashville Ballet, and Oregon Ballet Theatre (where he was briefly resident choreographer), includes such risky special effects as a live video feed that didn't, in the end, work very well, and considerable manipulation of scale. In some respects, Aliss, McIntyre's first essay at a specifically narrative ballet, is a preamble to Peter Pan. The standard characters are present, including a Queen of Hearts whose steps are as classically regal as any Swan Queen's, but in this version Aliss goes plunging into the bowels of a giant television set instead of a rabbit hole, and the score is a mixture of classical and popular music.

WHILE MCINTYRE FREQUENTLY favors classical music, primarily of the twentieth century, he has also made a number of pieces with pop scores, most notably Memphis, set to music by such eminent Southern musicians as Elvis Presley, John Lee Hooker, and B.B. King. "Pop music is the hardest to choreograph to," McIntyre said. "It's repetitive, simple, and you can't use it as a road map, the way you can classical."

The road map for Peter Pan is an arrangement of music by Sir Edward Elgar, on which Oregon Ballet Theatre's music director and conductor Niel DePonte worked in close collaboration with the choreographer for nearly three years.

"Trey is a great collaborator. I love working with him," DePonte, who is also a percussionist and published composer, said last fall. For a scenario based on Barrie's very English novel, the choice of the equally English composer's music is a logical one, although challenging on several counts.

"Elgar," DePonte pointed out with a sigh, "didn't write swashbuckling music. Finding something for the third act Captain Hook and Peter pas de deux wasn't easy, believe me." DePonte's solution was to transcribe some music for percussion to accompany the cut and thrust of the dueling dancers.

A greater problem was overuse of such Elgar standards as Pomp and Circumstance and The Enigma Variations. DePonte solved that one by taking excerpts from largely unfamiliar suites and, with bridging material added, created a score that meets the demands of McIntyre's choreography as well as the technical requirements of the production.

With a budget of $825,000 (including rehearsal and performance costs), Peter Pan is not the most lavish ballet Houston has produced, but there are several scene changes in each act to be dealt with by Boyd, a former Ballet Chicago dancer who has been in Houston since 1976. "My experience as a dancer has been invaluable," he said. "It gave me an insider understanding of how dancers use space." Boyd, who has worked with McIntyre for many years, read the Barrie book and aimed for a child's understanding of her surroundings and a Victorian influence on the domestic scenes. Neverland is another matter. It is completely red, because in McIntyre's vision of Barrie's "redskins," camouflage is a part of their culture "so the scenery has to be something into which they can disappear," Boyd said.

"The design has to be affordable and create a look," he added. "I enjoy working with Trey enormously. There is an alive, electric quality to his process [that is] good to work with."

BUTTON, A HIGHLY EXPERIENCED designer of costumes for theater and opera whose first big ballet designs were for McIntyre's Aliss, agreed nearly four years ago to design costumes for Peter on spec. "I never expected to see it done," she said from her home in New Orleans. She too loves working with McIntyre and shares his commitment to creating this ballet from the child's point of view. The fairy costumes feature bustles and huge dragonfly wings; the pirates have elaborate tattoos; and the "redskins," whom McIntyre envisions as truly red-skinned people, are clad in vaguely Peruvian-looking designs. Period sailor suits are worn by the younger Lost Boys.

All of these costumes, intended to reflect the passion of the dancing as well as to be part of the expression of character, are made of fabrics as richly textured as McIntyre's choreography. Purchased more than a year ago, the bolts of cloth were in storage along with the company's Cleopatra and Swart Lake costumes when devastating floods hit Houston last spring (see Presstime News, Dance Magazine, September 2001, page 34). It took a Herculean effort to recover them from the damage of water and sewage, but biotechnology and hard labor succeeded in saving them all.

"That costume gives me a lot to live up to," Timothy O'Keefe, who will dance Captain Hook, said in August, speaking of Button's wickedly elaborate creation for his character. Rehearsals were not to begin until December, but O'Keefe, who has played such deliciously evil characters as Dracula, was looking forward to the role and to working again With McIntyre. "Trey knows conceptually what he wants and he goes for it."

He also knows what he doesn't want: There is no Nana because McIntyre has never seen a dog onstage that works, and while Tinker Bell and one other fairy will fly, as will Peter Pan, Wendy, Michael, and John, at times Tinker Bell will be distilled to a darting light to represent "the spirit of the dance."

Martha Ullman West, a former co-chair of the Dance Critics Association, is a Dance Magazine senior editor/advisor who lives in Portland, Oregon. She also writes for the Eugene Weekly and Dance Chronicle.