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Justin Peck was round 17 when he first heard the Sufjan Stevens album “Illinois,” an epic paean to the state, almost two dozen tracks brimming with orchestral indie rock, dense, lyrical wistfulness and typically obscure native historical past. This listening expertise got here lengthy earlier than Peck wished to make dances, earlier than he was even knowledgeable dancer.
But “Illinois” urged him to maneuver. “It was an instantaneous, illuminating factor that I felt prefer it was so danceable,” mentioned Peck, now the resident choreographer and inventive adviser at New York City Ballet. “And it’s so uncommon to search out somebody who can conjure that, particularly somebody who’s alive proper now.”
Ever since, Peck, 36, has discovered inventive inspiration in Stevens — “the voice in music that has led me down paths additional than I’ve ever gone earlier than,” he mentioned.
The two collaborated commonly, together with on “Year of the Rabbit,” the ballet that launched Peck as a choreographer, in 2012. Not lengthy after they started working collectively, Peck, hoping to experiment with storytelling varieties, and influenced by dance-pop productions like Twyla Tharp’s “Movin’ Out,” requested if he might make a theatrical piece set to “Illinois.” Stevens took almost 5 years to agree.
Almost 5 years later, the result’s “Illinoise,” a challenge that’s each bit as formidable and genre-defying as its soundtrack: a story dance musical that mixes a coming-of-age story, a snapshot of queer identification and a meditation on demise, love, neighborhood, historical past, politics and zombies.
Growing up, Peck mentioned, the humanities, particularly theater, gave him a way of belonging. He framed “Illinoise” by a protagonist who seeks out the massive metropolis, “discovering his tribe and his voice and his sexuality — all of this stuff that a variety of us undergo, particularly these of us who’ve moved to a spot like New York from smaller or extra conservative areas.”
The choreography weaves collectively playful punk vitality and faucet dancing, funky solos and craving pas de deux, with a forged whose members embody ballet dancers and former contestants on “So You Think You Can Dance.” After bought out, rapturously acquired performances at Bard College and at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, “Illinoise” runs March 2-26 on the Park Avenue Armory, with an eye fixed towards increasing to greater phases, like Broadway.
“It appears like essentially the most broadly interesting factor that I’ve really ever labored on,” mentioned Jackie Sibblies Drury, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who signed on to assist form the story, which has no dialogue. “But your entire strategy of it has felt so intimate and private.”
This is regardless of a forged of 16 and an orchestra of 14, with three vocalist-musicians who convey their very own non-Sufjan tones, together with Shara Nova, also referred to as My Brightest Diamond, who was a part of the unique recording of “Illinois.”
“Illinois” was Stevens’s breakthrough album, and since its 2005 launch, it has entranced followers like Drury, who associates it with a transfer to Chicago in her early 20s, at a second when she was figuring out whether or not her then boyfriend might be her husband (he’s). “It feels just like the album needs you to dwell your life to it,” she mentioned.
It’s additionally on repeat in dance studios — not simply Peck’s — particularly throughout improvisations, mentioned Ricky Ubeda, a performer within the present. “It’s simply so dynamic,” he mentioned, “and his voice is so felt, that it’s straightforward to let that transfer by the physique.”
Ubeda, who gained “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2014, performs Henry, the central character in “Illinoise.” He leaves house and meets up with a crew of younger buddies over a lantern campfire, like a minimalist Wes Anderson scene. They share tales — the dances — from their journals. Henry is reluctant to open up at first, although he fortunately scribbles in his e book because the vocalists sing: “Are you writing from the guts?”
That’s a lyric from the jubilant monitor “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition / Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream),” which performs in an ensemble sequence whose choreography pops with Jerome Robbins-style pleasure.
The present begins with Henry on a blanket, spooning together with his companion, Douglas (Ahmad Simmons). Both performers labored on the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel,” which earned Peck a Tony Award for choreography. He obtained in contact with them when “Illinoise” was in its earliest phases. “He took us for a stroll, and talked us by his imaginative and prescient for his piece,” Ubeda mentioned. “He didn’t actually have the solutions to what it could grow to be. It was like, how will we inform the story so it was felt and seen, with out phrases?”
Costumed in a baseball hat, shorts and a backpack, with a motion type that’s each lithe and emotionally bending, Ubeda, 28, has a Stevens vibe — although Henry wasn’t meant to be a Sufjan stand-in, mentioned Peck, for whom the challenge was not biographical, however private. “There’s a variety of parallels to issues I’ve gone by and other people I’ve misplaced, as a teenager on the earth,” he mentioned.
For Ubeda, too: “As a queer particular person, I’ve been in Henry’s footwear, falling in love with somebody who loves you, however doesn’t love you in that manner” — a teenage rite-of-passage, he mentioned.
Stevens, 48, has not been actively concerned within the manufacturing. He introduced final fall that he had Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune dysfunction that left him unable to stroll; he was present process remedy and anticipated to get well, he mentioned in a press release. An intensely non-public artist, he additionally shared on social media final spring in regards to the demise of his companion, Evans Richardson, a museum administrator — publicly addressing his sexuality for the primary time within the course of. Though Stevens had been in discussions with the “Illinoise” workforce in regards to the music, Richardson’s demise derailed his participation, firm members mentioned. (Through a consultant, Stevens declined an interview request.)
The composer and musician Timo Andres — additionally a earlier Stevens collaborator — created the preparations, which embody interludes from the album that haven’t been carried out dwell, Andres mentioned.
For the stage model, he tried to maintain the DIY spirit of the recording, which was made with a lot of Stevens’s buddies, typically in advert hoc studios round New York. It’s “fairly orchestral, but additionally fairly intimate and fairly homespun,” Andres mentioned.
The music additionally has a grand lushness, he mentioned, as if it wished to develop past its aural container: “It’s like listening to the New York Philharmonic in a highschool gymnasium or one thing. It’s bursting on the seams.”
Even in a manufacturing of this measurement, he couldn’t match a few of the album sounds (“We’re not going to rent 4 oboe gamers only for this one second”), so he depends on the musicians, who carry out onstage, to convey the complexity with a number of devices.
Nova performs the electrical guitar and sings, together with Elijah Lyons and Tasha Viets-VanLear. The vocalists put on translucent, multicolor butterfly wings, in homage to the costumes on the “Illinois” tour. (A inventive polymath, Stevens got here up with the concept of wings made out of kites, Nova mentioned.)
In some methods, Nova is the institutional reminiscence of “Illinoise.” But decoupling this efficiency from her expertise making songs just like the piercing “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” with Stevens — “I bear in mind crying at that recording session with him,” she mentioned — has been intense, particularly as she worries about her pal after his traumatic 12 months.
What has helped is reference to the dancers — the singers typically lock eyes with them, which she referred to as “thrilling” — and the conclusion that the music can endure, other than Stevens.
“I imply, you may’t even take a look at the audiences as a result of so far as we are able to see, individuals are crying,” Nova mentioned. “This is why all of us come to theater, is simply to have an area to really feel emotions that we don’t see or can’t categorical on the earth.”
For Peck, translating the main points of this beloved however sophisticated album into dance and narrative left him questioning how literal to make sure moments. The creators erred on the facet of legibility: During “Casimir Pulaski Day,” which references “most cancers of the bone,” the dancer Gaby Diaz seems with an IV bag and her companion (Ben Cook) rends his chest.
“This present is a bit scary for me as a result of it does discover darker themes and darker experiences,” mentioned Peck, noting that his choreography typically hums with elation as a substitute. (“It’s sort of annoying, really — even when I attempt to not put that in, instinctually, it simply, like, filters into it.”)
But in considered one of his final conversations with Stevens in regards to the challenge, the musician reminded him to peel again the layers of the album — “this vivid joyous factor” — and lean into its depths.
Jessica Dessner, an artist, author and former dancer — and sister of the Stevens buddies Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National — launched Stevens to Peck (at Peck’s request) greater than a decade in the past. She mentioned that for Stevens, dance became a pure extension of his multilevel work, which incorporates illustration and movie. “He actually simply noticed it as one other emanation of this universe that he creates with all of his tasks,” she mentioned.
Coming into the manufacturing as a non-dancer, Drury discovered herself regarding its emotional beats, like a second when Henry and Douglas, as a love-struck couple, break by a cacophony and do a easy field step slide, holding fingers and respiratory, deeply, collectively, with their eyes closed. “It makes me cry each time I see it,” she mentioned.
Given his stature within the dance world, Peck naturally attracted high-level collaborators and performers. Execution mattered, however empathy was paramount. The hope, he mentioned, is that the present “helps folks perceive the world, or perceive themselves, their relationships or the concept of loss a bit bit extra, precisely what theater did for me, particularly as a lonely younger child.”
The intention resonated, even within the firm members’s rehearsal cheer: “Feel it!” they cried.
