Justin Peck, a young ballet dancer, “just a little punk kid, trying to find my way,” wrote a letter to a musician he admired, singer-songwriter-producer Sufjan Stevens. He had heard the orchestral suite by Stevens called The BQE and thought it was excellent music for dancing. “So I wrote: ‘Hey, if you want to collaborate, you know, dance or ballet, let me know.’ And of course I didn’t get any response.”
But here I am, talking to Peck during a video call about his new show, which, you guessed it, is based entirely on the music of Sufjan Stevens, specifically his 2005 album Illinois. After all, it wasn’t such a pipe dream. Billed as “a new kind of musical,” Illinoise (according to the stage version’s title) contains no dialogue but is “almost like a silent movie,” with a story told through lyrics and the movement of dancers, Peck says.
Illinoise is not the first collaboration between Peck and Stevens, who were introduced by a mutual friend a few years after the letter. By this point, Peck was no longer a little punk kid but America’s choreographic wunderkind; At 26, he became the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, where he was already a dancer. Touted as the successor to Jerome Robbins; A beautiful, technical, highly musical dance producer, fresh and young at the same time, rooted in classicism but definitely modern. Peck dancers, who wear sneakers instead of pointe shoes or dance in gender-neutral roles, are as likely to gravitate towards the music of National or Bryce Dessner of French electronic group M83 as Aaron Copland or Stravinsky. In Peck’s work, the bodies on stage appear to be real young people, with the authenticity that is so valuable a characteristic of the 21st century.
Given that he’s the most lauded American ballet choreographer to emerge this century, it’s surprising that Peck’s work isn’t often seen in the UK (San Francisco Ballet brought one of his pieces to London in 2019), but if you’ve seen Bradley Cooper’s sailor dance Maestro You’ve probably seen Peck’s work in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story or even Jennifer Lawrence, who turns ballerina-turned-spy in Red Sparrow. And when New York City Ballet comes to London in March, there’ll be a chance to see more, with Peck’s 2020 piece Rotunda sharing the bill with UK premieres by Pam Tanowitz, Kyle Abraham and a classic by NYCB co-founder George Balanchine .
The Rotunda is a fine example of what Peck is known for. It’s an abstract, one-act ballet set to music by contemporary composer Nico Muhly, in a work that Peck says “even though it’s so beautiful, it almost feels like a math equation.” Peck says this piece, performed with what appears to be workout equipment, is about “the process and repetition of the dancer’s art.” The dance fully meets the rhythm and structure of the music; There’s speed and athleticism, but there’s also an easy, unforced quality. It gives the feeling of a community of dancers whose steps emerge spontaneously.
This sense of community is also present at Illinoise, where a group of people sit around the fire and share stories. “It tells the origins of theatre, of gathering around the campfire, of the kind of magic that comes with light and heat. [saying]: ‘Okay, let’s entertain each other,’ says Peck, who developed the script with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. Stevens was less involved: “He’s had a really tough year,” Peck says, referring to the death of Stevens’ partner, Evans Richardson, and his diagnosis with the autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré syndrome. “He had to work to regain his ability to walk.”
Whether consciously or not, community has always been a central theme of Peck’s work. “I think it’s because I’ve struggled so much with: ‘Where do I belong? ‘What is my community?’ So I feel like I’m always trying to build it.
Peck grew up north of San Diego in a “sleepy surf town” where he was always restless. “I didn’t feel like I connected with a lot of people, and I would say I had a very lonely childhood and didn’t have a lot of friends.” Her mother was born and raised in Argentina but has roots in Ukraine. His father was a New Yorker who reluctantly transferred to California. Peck went to a large, sports-oriented high school where “it was very easy to get lost.” So I was the lost child who was kind of a terror in this world. “I don’t want to feel that way again, and I don’t want anyone else to feel that way either.”
But every summer, Peck’s father would take the family to New York for a week to soak up the culture. They saw a lot of theater, and Peck took up tap dancing, inspired by Savion Glover in the hit musical Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk. He was interested in local theater and then ballet. “Ballet was kind of the last stop, so it’s ironic that I ended up in this world. “I feel like an outsider, like this isn’t for me, but, um, it is.”
It definitely is. Peck entered the School of American Ballet at age 15 and found where she belonged in New York, where her father’s family was from. Peck told me proudly that his grandfather was civil rights activist James Peck, who took part in the Freedom Rides in the early ’60s that challenged segregation in the South and was imprisoned more than 50 times. Although The Times Are Racing was written during the 2016 election campaign, there isn’t much politics in Peck’s work. He describes how in one scene a ballerina climbs over a group of people and stands there triumphantly. And I was thinking, ‘Oh, this is kind of a tribute to our next president, Hillary Clinton.’ “This was going to be something iconic,” he says. And the next day it was announced that Trump had won. “That changed the whole tenor of the piece,” says Peck. “We decided the next move would be for it to fall and be swallowed.” The final work evolved into a piece about freedom of protest and expression, the right to collective organization, and the right to “find power in that meeting and sense of community,” Peck says, and he uses that word again.
Will he have to make a sequel when Trump enters the race again? “Oh God, I don’t want to think about it,” he laughs, shaking his disheveled head, a touch of young Adrien Brody’s features. Would another Trump presidency affect his world of work, ballet and theater? “We feel like we can exist in this bubble of art and dance, but even that has the potential to be threatened,” she says. “I think this will create a new divide in this country that will ripple out in ways that even I cannot fathom.”
Peck is a fixture at New York City Ballet, but he’s always looking for new, unpredictable projects. One of the things that draws him to the work of Sufjan Stevens is that he’s not an artist who stays in one lane, and Peck has likewise deftly leapt from choreographing a music video for the National to Carousel (which he also directed). A fashion show for Broadway, Dolly Parton’s commercial or Opening Ceremony. He recently choreographed a show featuring the Buena Vista Social Club with his Cuban-American wife, Patricia Delgado. Maybe we’ll see more of him in England. He’d love Illinoise to come here. “I think this is the kind of show that audiences out there can really connect with,” he says, as a chance to expand his community. “I hope this happens.”
The Rotunda is part of the New York City Ballet Mixed Bill, to be held March 7-10 in Sadler’s Wells, London. Illinoise is at New York’s Park Avenue Armory from March 2 to 23.