For someone who had no stomach for “happy nonsense,” only the darkly-twisted variety , Edward Gorey couldn’t have a better name. The Trey McIntyre Project has flown into town, literally on the wings of Gorey’s creepy Victorian and Edwardian-era creatures, for the Chicago premiere of The Vinegar Works: Four Dances of Moral Instruction, commissioned by The Harris Theater.
Adapted from the illustrations and text of four Gorey tales, the 35-minute piece includes “The Gashlycrum Tinies,” from Gorey’s collection titled The Vinegar Works, along with “The Beastly Baby,” “The Deranged Cousins,” and “The Disrespectful Summons.” The Vinegar Works will be performed at the Harris theater on Thursday night only, along with Mercury Half-Life, McIntyre’s rock ballet set to the music of Freddie Mercury and the band Queen.
McIntyre never expected to use his choreography to tell stories. “I always veered away from narrative,” he says, “although you’d think I would have gone there, given my years with The Houston Ballet,” a company rich in story ballet repertoire. The Vinegar Works is his first narrative ballet for his company, and ironically, the last piece he will have choreographed before his company goes to part-time operations, freeing up needed time for the multi-faceted McIntyre to pursue a growing interest in film-making. The Harris engagement is part of The Trey McIntyre Project’s final U.S. tour as a full-time company.
Gorey’s work had intrigued McIntyre for some time before the Harris Theater commission came about. Michael Tiknis, president and managing director of the Harris, served as creative match-maker, bringing McIntyre and The Music Institute of Chicago together. When Music Institute director Mark George suggested the haunting Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E Minor, McIntyre was astounded at how right-on it was for this piece. Talented pre-professional musicians from the Institute’s highly-selective Academy program recorded the music for its premiere at the company’s home theater in Boise, Idaho, but will perform live at the Harris, and also at the world-renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Lee, Massachusetts later this summer.
McIntyre says his biggest challenge was to faithfully bring the author-illustrator’s macabre humor to life. “It’s really challenging content,” he says, “with this weird combination of the adorable and the horrible.” Translating that into dance required a collaborative effort that included narrated text (the recorded voice of actor Alan Cumming of “The Good Wife” fame), and visual elements that would lift Gorey’s two-dimensional pen and ink drawings off the page. “The stories needed animation,” McIntyre said. That was accomplished by Disney-fame puppet-maker Michael Curry, who designed and built puppets that could be totally integrated into the choreography. “The dancers are the puppeteers,” McIntyre explained. “They move in and out of their roles, sometimes becoming the character of the puppet, and sometimes, as another character, interacting with the puppet. “We wanted to expose the mechanics of puppetry instead of hiding it.”
For McIntyre, the most fulfilling aspect of creating The Venegar Works has been the surprise of seeing how all of his previous work with the company has prepared the dancers to take on the challenges of this very different kind of ballet. “I always ask them to be utterly in the moment,” he says, similar to what an actor must do, as if discovering for the first time the truth of Gorey’s darkly absurdist take on the human condition. “The storytelling is really quite literal.”
The Vinegar Works will be performed at 7:30 PM on Thursday, April 3rd at the Harris Theater at Millenium Park, 205 East Randolph Drive. For tickets, phone the Box Office at 312-334-7777.
(If you’re working downtown, you can catch Mercury Half-Life on Friday at 5:30 PM for the Harris’s “Eat and Drink To The Beat” series, and there will be a special family matinee on Saturday, April 5, at 2 PM.)
