Photo by Trey McIntyre.
BODYTRAFFIC dancers from the 2025 production of "Ma Maison".
It was November 21, 2008 in New Orleans, three years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall and the levees broke; three years since the city went underwater. Much of the population that had called the city home was still, slowly, finding its way back after so suddenly and traumatically losing everything. Some never would return. The city itself was being arduously reassembled, brick by brick, the memory of all that had been lost clashing against a stubborn spirit of hope. And across the world, people struggled to understand: Why rebuild such a vulnerable, unlikely city at all?
That night, at the Dixon Concert Hall at Tulane University (all other major performance venues in the city were still under repair), an audience of around one thousand New Orleanians waited for a response offered by a groundbreaking collaboration of artists both of and inspired by the city, who promised to proclaim: this, this is why.
“We thought, ‘How can we be a part of spreading the message worldwide that the creativity of the city is alive, that there are things happening here? We knew that our jazz artists were some of our most important ambassadors. And we felt like pairing this world-renowned choreographer with a world-renowned jazz band, this work would have immediate touring legs. It would be the most immediate way of making sure the word spread around the world.” —Jenny Hamilton, the Executive Director of the New Orleans Ballet Association
“We thought, ‘How can we be a part of spreading the message worldwide that the creativity of the city is alive, that there are things happening here?” said Jenny Hamilton, the Executive Director of the New Orleans Ballet Association, which had commissioned the groundbreaking collaboration between world-renowned choreographer Trey McIntyre and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “We knew that our jazz artists were some of our most important ambassadors. And we felt like pairing this world-renowned choreographer with a world-renowned jazz band, this work would have immediate touring legs. It would be the most immediate way of making sure the word spread around the world.”
Photo by Trey McIntyre.
BODYTRAFFIC dancer from the 2025 production of "Ma Maison."
After its premiere, “Ma Maison,” would go on to more than fifty cities, earning rave reviews from major publications like the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times. But for this first night, it was all for New Orleans.
The show began in the sudden, spontaneous way of New Orleans’s mesmerizing street jazz performances, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band erupting into the standard rag, “That’s a Plenty.” Dancers from the Trey McIntyre Project played the part. Dressed in the garish, over-the-top style of Carnival, their limbs reached and shimmied and kicked in the intuitive, corporeal joy imposed by the band’s syncopated rhythms. They were familiar, but they were not meant to be people. Each one wore a mask, a skull. They were dancing skeletons.
For McIntyre, the metaphor of the second line felt resonant in the New Orleans of that time, when the city was still on its knees, sustained—more than anything—by the hope and sporadic joy woven into its very cultural fabric.
“In New Orleans, I feel like the day-to-day is so much about living your life because of the presence of death,” said McIntyre. The awareness of our own ephemerality grants all the more reason to embrace pleasure and joy alike. At the same time, observing what has been lost, and granting the space to mourn and wail over it through ritual, lets celebration in, and allows us to survive it.
Responding to the anthems of Preservation Hall, the dancers, as macabre jesters, shifted between unison and chaos, play and ritual, humor and darkness, technical mastery and improvisation. The Times Picayune’s reviewer, Chris Waddington, called the performance a “unique artistic triumph,” akin to Mardi Gras, “the dark revel that only makes sense when you’ve gone through a hurricane season, buried a few friends, and danced in a second line parade with tears in your eyes.”
Making “Ma Maison”
In 2007, when Hamilton first approached McIntyre about the project, “it was like the idea had already been in my head,” he recalled. “It was like I was saying ‘yes’ to something that I didn’t know I was already doing.”
McIntyre fell in love with New Orleans while he was a dancer with the Houston Ballet during the 1990s—spending all of his vacations in the Crescent City. “There’s just something so unique and special and creative and inspiring about that place and the people that I think is harder to find in this country,” he said. “Preserving places like New Orleans has become more and more crucial.”
Photo by Trey McIntyre.
BODYTRAFFIC dancers from the 2025 production of "Ma Maison."
He knew, though, that he couldn’t get this wrong. “A lot of communities value authenticity,” he said. “But in New Orleans, they don’t have time for bullshit, and I knew that I wanted to be a conduit and representative of the people there.” Before he even began choreographing, he spent intentional time in the city, speaking with culture bearers and listening to what was important to them. “It’s a special thing, being an artist in that way, getting to step into different cultures as sort of an archaeologist, and getting certain kinds of access that has a real purpose behind it.”
From the beginning, Hamilton and McIntyre knew that New Orleans jazz would be a centerpiece of the project. They just needed the right musicians. McIntyre spent weeks visiting local jazz halls. “I think the thing for me about Prez Hall was twofold,” he said. “One was the connection to the genre’s most historical roots, this true preservation of the style that spoke to what is the flavor and experience of the city. And the other thing was meeting Ben Jaffe.”
“This creation, it helped us, as a band, to take the next step forward to move the city forward, to move ourselves forward, to move our lives forward.” —Ben Jaffe, Creative Director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band
“It was this immediate meeting of the minds of these two creative geniuses,” said Hamilton of McIntyre’s collaboration with Jaffe, the longtime creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “It was incredible.”
“Great artistic collaborations are one of the joys of my life,” said Jaffe. “You get to learn about another person’s creative process, really immersing yourself in a new world, beginning to see where you can contribute to that world, and where your worlds overlap.”
Courtesy of Trey McIntyre.
Dancers from the Trey McIntyre Project in the original 2008 production of "Ma Maison."
As dance is a core quality of New Orleans music, Jaffe said it was nothing new to join his work to movement. “But it was a different sort of interpretation,” he said. “We got to learn a lot about movement and timing and the things these kinds of dancers respond to.”
As for McIntyre, he found the improvisational quality of jazz a worthy challenge to his exacting approach to choreography. “There was a big kind of letting go that had to happen working with a live band, and seeing the opportunities that come from that, how a dancer might interpret or color a movement differently from show to show, and it’s lovely in its own way.”
A Victorious Return
Seventeen years since “Ma Maison’s” premiere, marking the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, McIntyre is returning to New Orleans in November to reprise “Ma Maison” with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and his Los Angeles dance troupe BODYTRAFFIC.
“It feels so right to restage the show again,” said Jaffe. “I’m old enough to know the importance of marking anniversaries, these important moments to acknowledge and reflect on the biggest events in all our lives . . . This performance became a pillar moment in my life. This creation, it helped us, as a band, to take the next step forward to move the city forward, to move ourselves forward, to move our lives forward.”
Brought together, the new production once again hones in on the dichotomous nature of our New Orleans, indulging in all its contradictions, articulating the duality of this city—a city of death, a city of life, where ecstasy ripples right through grief, coexisting in a singular form of survival unlike anywhere else on earth.
Now, returning to New Orleans in 2025, “Ma Maison” holds a new meaning. “When you say, ‘Katrina,’ and you say ’twenty years,’ that takes every single one of us back to what we were doing when the storm hit, and the weeks and months and years afterward,” said Hamilton. “We have a million stories. And it’s still difficult, the lives that were lost. But there’s something celebratory, too, in the sense that as a city we are still here. We came out of what was complete and utter devastation and stood up as a city and said, ‘New Orleans matters. It matters to the country. It matters to the world.’ And that’s what we’re celebrating with this restaging.”
Courtesy of Trey McIntyre.
Dancers from the Trey McIntyre Project in the original 2008 production of "Ma Maison."
In addition to “Ma Maison,” NOBA’s November performance by McIntyre’s BODYTRAFFIC and Preservation Hall Jazz Band will feature a reprisal of the collaboration’s companion piece, “The Sweeter End.” Meant as a counterpoint to “Ma Maison,” the dance is inspired by New Orleans’s embrace of pleasure, “the quietness, and the juiciness, and the utter joy of what it is to be a human being,” said McIntyre.
But the production will actually open with a never-before-performed-in-New Orleans work by McIntyre called “MayDay,” which also carries with it themes of death and living with relish, this time as an homage to Buddy Holly, who had an enormous early influence on rock and roll, and died in a plane crash at the age of twenty-two. “When we think about what’s valuable in our life, to have lived a life that’s short and have contributed that much . . .” said McIntyre. “The dance has this red airplane that hovers over the dancers, with this sort of impending feeling of death, but at the same time, the dancers are having relationships, they’re endeavoring to live a life there, even knowing that one day it’ll all be over.”
Brought together, the new production once again hones in on the dichotomous nature of our New Orleans, indulging in all its contradictions, articulating the duality of this city—a city of death, a city of life, where ecstasy ripples right through grief, coexisting in a singular form of survival unlike anywhere else on earth.
“Victory,” said Jaffe, of what the audience should expect to feel, watching the performance in November. “Emotionally, the audience will walk away with a feeling of victory.” nobadance.com.
.jpg)
