When Justin Peck was a teenage ballet dancer, “just a little punk kid trying to find my way,” he wrote a letter to a musician he admired, the singer-songwriter-producer Sufjan Stevens. He had heard an orchestral suite that Stevens had written, The BQE, and thought it was perfect dance music. “So I just wrote, ‘Hey, if you ever want to collaborate or, you know, do a dance or ballet, let me know.’ And of course I didn’t hear anything back.”
But here I am, talking to Peck on a video call about his new show, set entirely to the music of, you guessed it, Sufjan Stevens, specifically his 2005 album, Illinois. Not such a utopia after all, as it turns out. Billed as “a new kind of musical,” Illinoise (as the stage version is called) has no dialogue but a story told through lyrics and the movement of the dancers, “almost like a silent movie,” says Peck.
Illinoise is not the first collaboration between Peck and Stevens, who were introduced by a mutual friend several years after the letter. At that moment, Peck was no longer a little punk boy, but America’s choreographic prodigy. At the age of 26, he became a permanent choreographer at the New York City Ballet, where he was already a dancer. He is touted as the heir to Jerome Robbins; a creator of beautiful, technical, extremely musical dance that is at the same time fresh and youthful, rooted in classicism but decidedly modern. Peck’s dancers, who might wear sneakers instead of pointe shoes or dance gender-neutral roles, are just as likely to move to music by Bryce Dessner of the national or French electronic band M83 as they are to Aaron Copland or Stravinsky. In Peck’s work, the bodies on stage appear to be real young people, with that much-valued quality of the 21st century: authenticity.
Given that he’s the most acclaimed American ballet choreographer to emerge this century, it’s surprising that Peck’s work has barely been seen in Britain (the San Francisco Ballet brought one of his pieces to London in 2019), but if you see Bradley Cooper’s sailor dance in Steven Spielberg’s Maestro or West Side Story, or even Jennifer Lawrence as ballerina turned spy in Red Sparrow, then you’ve seen Peck’s work. And there’ll be a chance to see more when the New York City Ballet comes to London in March, with Peck’s 2020 piece Rotunda on the bill that includes UK premieres from Pam Tanowitz, Kyle Abraham and a classic from NYCB’s co-founder George Balanchine .
Rotunda is a great example of what Peck has become known for. 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.” Performed in what appears to be rehearsal gear, it is a piece, says Peck, about “the process and repetition of the dancer’s craft.” The dance meets the rhythm and structure of the music with accuracy; there is speed and athleticism, but also an easy, casual quality. It feels like a community of dancers whose steps emerge spontaneously.
That sense of community is also present in Illinoise, where a group of people sit around a fire and share their stories. “It speaks to the origins of theater, 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 screenplay with Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. Stevens was less involved: “He’s had a very difficult year,” Peck says, referring to the death of Stevens’ partner Evans Richardson, and he was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré syndrome. “He has had to work to regain his ability to walk.”
Whether consciously or not, community has always been the theme running through Peck’s work. “I think it’s because I’ve had so much trouble, like, ‘Where do I belong? What is my community?’ So I feel like I’m always trying to build it up.
Peck grew up in a “sleepy surf town” north of San Diego, where he was always restless. “I didn’t feel like I was in touch with many people and I had, I would say, a very lonely childhood and not many friends.” His mother was born and raised in Argentina, but her roots are in Ukraine. His father was a New Yorker who had been reluctantly transplanted to California. Peck went to a large, sports-oriented high school, “where it was very easy to get lost. So I was this lost boy in this world who was kind of terrifying. I don’t want to feel that way anymore and I don’t want other people to feel that way.”
But every summer, Peck’s father took 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 became involved in local theater and then ballet. “Ballet was kind of a last stop, so it’s ironic that I fell into this world. I feel like an outsider, like it’s not really my thing, but, um, it is.”
It certainly is. Peck got a place at the School of American Ballet at the age of 15 and found where he belonged in New York, where his father’s family came from. His grandfather was civil rights activist James Peck, who participated in the early 1960s Freedom Rides that challenged segregation in the South and ended up in prison more than 50 times, Peck tells me with pride. There isn’t a lot of politics in Peck’s work, although his piece The Times Are Racing was made during the 2016 election campaign. He talks about how in one scene a ballerina climbs onto a group of people “and she stands there triumphantly. And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s kind of a tribute to our next president, Hillary Clinton.’ It would become something iconic,” he says. And the next day, Trump’s victory was announced. “It changed the entire arc of the piece,” Peck says. “We decided the next move would be for her to fall and be swallowed.” The latest work has evolved into a piece about protest and freedom of expression, the right to organize collectively “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 running? “Oh God, I don’t want to think about that,” he laughs, shaking his disheveled head, a hint of the young Adrien Brody crossing his features. Would a new Trump presidency have consequences for his working world, ballet and theater? “It feels like we can exist in this bubble of art and dance, but even that can be threatened,” he says. “I just think it would create a further divide in this country that will continue in ways I can’t even fathom.”
Peck is a fixture at the New York City Ballet, but he is always looking for new, unpredictable projects. One of the things that attracted him to Sufjan Stevens’ work is that he is not an artist who gets stuck in one line, and Peck is the same, deftly making the leap from choreographing a music video for the National (which he also directed ) to Carousel on Broadway, an advertisement 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 might even get to see more of him in Britain. He would like to see Illinoise come here. “I just think this is the kind of show audiences would really connect with,” he says, an opportunity to expand his community, you might say. “I hope it can happen.”
Rotunda is part of New York City Ballet Mixed Bill, at Sadler’s Wells, London, from March 7 to 10. Illinoise is at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from March 2 to 23.