Wolf Trap, the nation's only national park for the performing arts, is in its sixth year of a mult-year, multi-disciplinary project that brings together artists and the national parks. The brainchild of Wolf Trap president Terre Jones, earlier iterations of this project have introduced audiences to parks as diverse as the Grand Canyon (where Bandaloop hung from the rafters in the Filene Center) to the underwater beauty off the U.S. Virgin Islands with a water ballet filmed in HD by Blue Land Media and Donald Byrd's searing evocation of the sugar cane plantations, to the lush, lava-enriched mountains of Hawaii 's Big Island with a breath catching elemental celebration of the earth by Halau O Kekuhi to the daredevil Wright brothers of Kitty Hawk and Elizabeth Streb's equally daring humans who try for flight, and the Kentucky caves and black hills of Mammoth Cave National Park where Doug Varone captured in spare eloquence the hardscrabble lives of miners and farmers who built this nation. This year Boise-based choreographer Trey McIntyre has been commissioned to create a work inspired by and filmed in Montana's expansive Glacier National Park. The piece, "The Sun Road," features video shot in the park this past June and dancing by six of McIntyre's company members, including former Washington Ballet dancer Jason Hartley, now a member of McIntyre's Group. I spoke to Trey earlier this month for a piece that appears in today's Weekend section of The Washington Post.
"When choreographer Trey McIntyre visited Glacier National Park in Montana last summer, he was overwhelmed by the sprawling mountain terrain, dense forest, alpine tundra and 130 lakes. All told, the park covers more than 1,500 square miles, abutting Canada, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and the southernmost portion of the Canadian Rockies.
'I got this feeling of vertigo, of being overpowered in this vast expanse,' McIntyre says of his initial visit to scout locations for a dance video commissioned by Wolf Trap."
