Etta James’ raw, gospel-tinged blues imperative rang through the Trey McIntyre Project studios as dancers perched on the verge of movement at a rehearsal last week. Then — bam! — they exploded as James kicked into ... not the celebratory Flo Rida rap hit, “Good Feeling” or even the disco-laced “Levels” by Avicii, which both sample James’ great lyric. This was the real deal: James’ 1962 bluesy, ballsy, uplifting hit “Something’s Got A Hold On Me.”
“Oh, it must be love,” that makes her feel this way, she continues in the song. “I’m even sweeter when I talk.”
Yet all James’ exuberant love songs belied her deeper real-life torment as she dealt with career highs and lows and drug addiction.
That contrast creates a subtle subtext to choreographer Trey McIntyre’s piece “Blue Until June” for the Project’s concerts titled “At Last,” with a trio of ballets that explore the myths and truths about love.
McIntyre made “Blue Until June” in 2000 for Washington Ballet’s tour of Cuba. The commission was to use James’ music.
The piece spans her musical repertoire, including her love anthem “At Last,” which will close the concert.
Although McIntyre planned to stage this piece well before, it is eerily timely today with James’ music receiving a renaissance in the wake of her death Jan. 20.
“This is a meaty opportunity to honor Etta James’s memory,” McIntyre says. “When people reflect about all the music she contributed, you realize what an important figure she was. I welcome the opportunity to honor her life so immediately”
The concert is dedicated to James’ memory.
“Blue Until June” grew out of a collaboration with visual designer Sandra Woodall and a conversation about how our ideas of love are inextricably tangled in and influenced by the American songbook.
“I think we’ve created this beast in pop music that says that love is only supposed to be about romance and happiness, or drama, dependency and tragedy,” McIntyre says. “That’s opposed to what a relationship is really about, which is a lot grayer. For young people, pop music is the first educator, so they think that’s what love is supposed to be about. As an adult you have to outrun some of those ideas.”
The dancers dive into that idea throughout the piece, striving to reconcile their emotional experience with the myth presented by the song.
At the beginning of the piece, they crawl from underneath a tarp that represents the earth, and they are covered in mud. (It’s fancy facial mud, actually.)
“All these people are buried in the dirtiness of being in the thick of romantic love,” he says. “They’re caked in this mud as they crawl up out of the ground and play out these dramas with one another.”
As they dance, the mud dries, cracks and flakes off. It transfers from dancer to dancer, leaving behind residue from the moment, in the same way our experiences leave lasting impressions on each other.
On the other side of the relationship spectrum is the opening piece “Leatherwing Bat,” which McIntyre created in Boise in 2008. It is to Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Peter, Paul and Mommy” album. It’s a slice of musical nostalgia that explores family dynamics.
While he was working on it, he called Peter Yarrow to ask him what they were thinking when they wrote the music.
It was in some ways an apology as the group contemplated what kind of world they were leaving their kids, Yarrow told him. At the time in 1969, the Vietnam War was in such a cultural quagmire that it seemed impossible there would be resolution.
The album was a constant for McIntyre during his Midwestern childhood. He focused the piece on a father-and-son relationship.
“I like the balance of how it speaks to relationship on the other side of things. It’s not a variation on a theme, but about how we learn about loving one another from our families,” he says.
