The Sweeter End (2011)
Choreography: Trey McIntyre
Music: Preservation Hall Jazz Band

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.
–The Los Angeles Times