by When Justin Peck was a teenage ballet dancer, “just a little punk kid, trying to make my way”, he wrote a letter to a musician he admired, singer-songwriter-producer Sufjan Stevens. He heard an orchestral suite written by Stevens, The BQE, and thought this was perfect music for dancing. “So I wrote: ‘Hey, if you ever want to collaborate or, you know, dance or do ballet, let me know.’ And of course, I didn’t hear back.”
But here I am, talking to Peck on a video call about his new show, which is devoted entirely to the music of Sufjan Stevens, specifically his 2005 album, Illinois. Not such a pipe dream after all, it turns out. Billed as “a new kind of music”, Illinoise (as the stage version is called) has no dialogue, but a story told through the lyrics of the songs and the movement of the dancers, “almost like a silent film”, says Peck.
Illinoise is not the first collaboration between Peck and Stevens, who were introduced by a mutual friend several years after the letter. By that point, Peck was no longer a little punk kid but America’s choreographic wunderkind, becoming resident choreographer at the New York City Ballet at 26, where he was already a dancer. He has contacted Jerome Robbins as an heir; a beautiful, technical, high-music dance maker who is also fresh and young, rooted in the classical but definitely modern. Peck’s dancers, who might wear sneakers instead of pointe shoes, or dance gender-neutral roles, are as likely to move to music by Bryce Dessner of the national or French electronic band M83 as Aaron Copland or Stravinsky. In Peck’s work, the bodies on stage appear to be real young people, with that quality that is so highly valued in the 21st century: authenticity.
Considering that he is the most acclaimed American ballet choreographer to emerge this century, it is surprising that Peck’s work has barely been seen in the UK (San Francisco Ballet brought one of his pieces to London in 2019), but if you’ve seen sailor Bradley Cooper dance in West Side Story Maestro or Steven Spielberg, or even Jennifer Lawrence as a ballerina turned spy in Red Sparrow, then you’ve seen Peck’s work. And there will be a chance to see more when New York City Ballet comes to London in March, with a 2020 piece from the Peck Rotunda sharing the bill with UK premieres from Pam Tanowitz, Kyle Abraham and a classic by NYCB co-founder George Balanchine.
Rotunda is a good example of Peck’s reputation. An abstract one-act ballet set to music by contemporary composer Nico Muhly, in a work that Peck says “almost feels like a mathematical equation, even though it’s so beautiful”. Rendered in what looks like rehearsal equipment, it’s a piece, says Peck, about “the process and repetition of the dancer’s craft”. The dance matches the rhythm and structure of the music precisely; there is no speed and athleticism but a quality that is also easy and unforced. It feels like a community of dancers whose steps evolve spontaneously.
There is also that sense of community in Illinois, where a group of people are sitting around a fire sharing their stories. “It speaks to the origins of theatre, gathering around the campfire, the kind of magic that comes with light and warmth, and [saying]: ‘Okay, let’s entertain each other,’” says Peck, who developed the scenario with Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. Stevens was no less involved: “He had a very difficult year,” says Peck, referring to the death of Stevens’ partner, Evans Richardson, while being diagnosed with the autoimmune condition Guillain-Barré syndrome. “He had to work to regain his ability to walk.”
Whether consciously or not, community has always been the theme that runs through Peck’s work. “I think it happened because I had so many difficulties, like: ‘Where am I a member? What is my community?’ So I feel like I’m always trying to build it.”
Peck grew up in a “sleepy surf town” north of San Diego, where he was always restless. “I didn’t feel like I belonged with many people and I had a lonely childhood, I would say, and I didn’t have many friends.” His mother was born and raised in Argentina but her roots are in Ukraine. His father was a New Yorker who reluctantly transplanted to California. Peck went to a huge sports-oriented high school, “where it was very easy to get lost. So I was this lost boy in this world that was kind of scary. I don’t want to feel that way again and I don’t want other people to feel that way.”
Every summer, however, Peck’s father would take the family to New York for a week to soak up the culture. They would see a lot of theater, and Peck took up tap-dancing, inspired by Savion Glover in the great musical Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in’ da Funk. He participated in local theater and then ballet. “Ballet was the last stop, so it’s ironic that I’ve fallen into this world. I feel like an outsider, because it’s not really my thing, but, um, it is.”
It certainly is. Peck got a place at the American Ballet School at 15, and in New York he found where he belonged, back where his father’s family came from. His grandfather was the civil rights activist James Peck, who participated in the Freedom Rides challenging segregation in the south in the early 60s and was imprisoned more than 50 times, Peck tells me with pride. Peck’s work is less political, although his piece The Times Are Racing was made during the 2016 election campaign. He tells how in one scene a ballet climbed a group of people “and she stands there triumphantly. And I was thinking: ‘Oh, that’s a tribute to our next president, Hillary Clinton.’ It was this iconic thing,” he says. And then the next day Trump’s victory was announced. “It changed the whole arc of the piece,” says Peck. “We decided the next proposition was for her to collapse and be swallowed.” The final work turned into a piece about protest and freedom of expression, the right to organize “and find power in that assembly and that sense of community”, says Peck, using that word again.
Will he have to make a sequel now that Trump is back in the swing? “God, I don’t want to think about that,” he laughs, shaking his head in shock, touching a young Adrien Brody under his features. Would another Trump presidency affect his work life, the ballet, the theater? “It feels like we’re able to exist in this bubble of art making and dance, but even that could be under threat,” he says. “I think it would create another division in this country that would come apart in ways that I can’t even fathom.”
Peck is a man at the New York City Ballet, but he’s always looking for new and unpredictable projects. One of the things that attracted him to Sufjan Stevens’ work is that he’s not an artist who stays in one lane, and Peck is no exception, jumping nicely from choreographing a music video for the National (which he also directed) to making Carousel on. Broadway, a commercial with Dolly Parton or a fashion show for the Opening Ceremony. He recently choreographed a show based on Buena Vista Social Club with his Cuban-American wife, Patricia Delgado. We may even see more of it in the UK. Illinoise would love to come here. “I think this is the kind of show that would really resonate with an audience,” he says, a chance to expand his audience, you might say. “I hope it can happen.”
Rotunda is part of New York City Ballet’s Mixed Bill, at Sadler’s Wells, London, 7 to 10 March. Illinoise is at Park Avenue Armory, New York, March 2 to 23.
