‘A silent film of dance underscored by an album’: inside the audacious Sufjan Stevens musical

Illinoise sees the artist’s 2005 album transform into an ambitious and eye-opening modern dance show like nothing else on Broadway

Justin Peck is spending the spring zigzagging between Times Square and the Upper West Side. The star choreographer of New York City Ballet has been biking between the spring season rehearsals at the Lincoln Center and the St James Theater on 44th street where Illinoise – a modern dance show which he choreographed to Sufjan Stevens’s 2005-dated album Illinois – has moved after a three-week run at the Park Avenue Armory. The liminal time on his bicycle is what Peck calls “one of the few Zen moments of the day”, where his foremost rule is to avoid any distraction and just pedal. “I don’t even listen to music, because even then I am doing something.”

Peck has been on the go for almost two decades now. In 2014, he was appointed the second resident choreographer in the history of NYCB and has over the years brought in a contemporary spin on the institution’s classical frame of ballet through original, upbeat – and occasionally sneaker-clad – shows and collaborations with established artists and fashion designers for set design and costumes, such as Jeffrey Gibson (who represents the US in this year’s Venice Biennale), Humberto Leon, Sterling Ruby, and Marcel Dzama. Peck has also helmed the choreography for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and won a Tony award for best choreography for his work in the 2018 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.