On screen, the tuxedoed dancers grapple with themselves and the environment, crawling all over each other through dirt and bramble like money-grubbing developers racing for the next plot of land. In a red ball gown, Chanel DaSilva is a Mother Earth figure who bleeds long red ribbons of netting. One particularly memorable image features a man lying naked in a bank of snow, which gradually seems to melt. A bit too literal, but point taken. In each spectacular setting, man transforms the landscape.
The relative isolation of McIntyre’s company in Idaho also seems to have helped the choreographer forge a vivid, distinctive movement aesthetic, best exemplified in the trio “(serious),’’ set to music by Henry Cowell. You don’t have to know that the work was inspired by a dream about screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman, but Kaufman’s episodic, mercurial sensibility clearly informs the dance. DaSilva, Brett Perry, and Jason Hartley connect and disconnect in brief solos, duets, and trios that mix a weighted, muscular gravitas with understated deadpan humor, juxtaposing incongruent gestures as they quickly shift dynamics. They twist their bodies into curved and angled shapes that seem to spurt energy into a dozen directions at once, each hyperextended, overrotated, super-articulate joint seeming to have its own drive. Yet they move with a lush, supple fluidity. It is at once riveting and puzzling and breathtaking.
“Like a Samba,’’ created in 1997 for the Oregon Ballet Theatre to the sultry vocals of Astrud Gilberto, gave the dancers a chance to showcase their range. In quicksilver shifts between the fluidly elegant and the quirkily playful, this crowd-pleaser pairs the long-lined elegance of ballet (with the women on point) with insouciant gestures that captured the sensuous playfulness of the music: delicious wiggles of the hips, flicks of the feet, rhythmic shimmies of the shoulders, and daring over-the-head lifts and tosses. Like the “Girl from Ipanema,’’ we go “Ah.’’
