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Justin Peck was around 17 when he first heard the Sufjan Stevens album \u201cIllinois,\u201d an epic paean to the state, nearly two dozen tracks brimming with orchestral indie rock, dense, lyrical wistfulness and sometimes obscure local history. This listening experience came long before Peck wanted to make dances, before he was even a professional dancer.<\/p>\n
But \u201cIllinois\u201d urged him to move. \u201cIt was an instantaneous, illuminating thing that I felt like it was so danceable,\u201d said Peck, now the resident choreographer and artistic adviser at New York City Ballet<\/a>. \u201cAnd it is so rare to find someone who can conjure that, especially someone who\u2019s alive right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Ever since, Peck, 36, has found artistic inspiration in Stevens \u2014 \u201cthe voice in music that has led me down paths further than I\u2019ve ever gone before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The two collaborated regularly<\/a>, including on \u201cYear of the Rabbit,\u201d the ballet that launched Peck as a choreographer<\/a>, in 2012. Not long after they began working together, Peck, hoping to experiment with storytelling forms, and influenced by dance-pop productions like Twyla Tharp\u2019s \u201cMovin\u2019 Out,\u201d asked if he could make a theatrical piece set to \u201cIllinois.\u201d Stevens took nearly five years to agree.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Almost five years later, the result is \u201cIllinoise,\u201d<\/a> a project that is every bit as ambitious and genre-defying as its soundtrack: a narrative dance musical that combines a coming-of-age story, a snapshot of queer identity and a meditation on death, love, community, history, politics and zombies.<\/p>\n Growing up, Peck said, the arts, especially theater, gave him a sense of belonging. He framed \u201cIllinoise\u201d through a protagonist who seeks out the big city, \u201cfinding his tribe and his voice and his sexuality \u2014 all of these things that a lot of us go through, especially those of us who have moved to a place like New York from smaller or more conservative areas.\u201d<\/p>\n The choreography weaves together playful punk energy and tap dancing, funky solos and yearning pas de deux, with a cast whose members include ballet dancers and former contestants on \u201cSo You Think You Can Dance.\u201d After sold out, rapturously received performances at Bard College<\/a> and at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, \u201cIllinoise\u201d runs March 2-26 at the Park Avenue Armory<\/a>, with an eye toward expanding to bigger stages, like Broadway.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like the most broadly appealing thing that I have actually ever worked on,\u201d said Jackie Sibblies Drury, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright<\/a>, who signed on to help shape the story, which has no dialogue. \u201cBut the entire process of it has felt so intimate and personal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This is despite a cast of 16 and an orchestra of 14, with three vocalist-musicians who bring their own non-Sufjan tones, including Shara Nova<\/a>, also known as My Brightest Diamond<\/a>, who was part of the original recording of \u201cIllinois.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIllinois\u201d was Stevens\u2019s breakthrough album, and since its 2005 release, it has entranced fans like Drury, who associates it with a move to Chicago in her early 20s, at a moment when she was determining whether her then boyfriend could be her husband (he is). \u201cIt feels like the album wants you to live your life to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also on repeat in dance studios \u2014 not just Peck\u2019s \u2014 especially during improvisations, said Ricky Ubeda<\/a>, a performer in the show. \u201cIt\u2019s just so dynamic,\u201d he said, \u201cand his voice is so felt, that it\u2019s easy to let that move through the body.\u201d<\/p>\n Ubeda, who won \u201cSo You Think You Can Dance\u201d in 2014, plays Henry, the central character in \u201cIllinoise.\u201d He leaves home and meets up with a crew of young friends over a lantern campfire, like a minimalist Wes Anderson scene. They share stories \u2014 the dances \u2014 from their journals. Henry is reluctant to open up at first, though he happily scribbles in his book as the vocalists sing: \u201cAre you writing from the heart?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s a lyric from the jubilant track \u201cCome On! Feel the Illinoise! (Part I: The World\u2019s Columbian Exposition \/ Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream),\u201d<\/a> which plays in an ensemble sequence whose choreography pops with Jerome Robbins-style joy.<\/p>\n The show begins with Henry on a blanket, spooning with his partner, Douglas (Ahmad Simmons). Both performers worked on the 2018 Broadway revival of \u201cCarousel,\u201d which earned Peck a Tony Award for choreography. He got in touch with them when \u201cIllinoise\u201d was in its earliest stages. \u201cHe took us for a walk, and talked us through his vision for his piece,\u201d Ubeda said. \u201cHe didn\u2019t really have the answers to what it would become. It was like, how do we tell the story so it was felt and seen, without words?\u201d<\/p>\n Costumed in a baseball hat, shorts and a backpack, with a movement style that is both lithe and emotionally bending, Ubeda, 28, has a Stevens vibe \u2014 though Henry wasn\u2019t intended to be a Sufjan stand-in, said Peck, for whom the project was not biographical, but personal. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of parallels to things I\u2019ve gone through and people I\u2019ve lost, as a young person in the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n For Ubeda, too: \u201cAs a queer person, I\u2019ve been in Henry\u2019s shoes, falling in love with someone who loves you, but doesn\u2019t love you in that way\u201d \u2014 a teenage rite-of-passage, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Stevens, 48, has not been actively involved in the production. He announced last fall that he had Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that left him unable to walk; he was undergoing treatment<\/a> and expected to recover, he said in a statement. An intensely private artist, he also shared on social media last spring about the death of his partner<\/a>, Evans Richardson, a museum administrator \u2014 publicly addressing his sexuality for the first time in the process. Though Stevens had been in discussions with the \u201cIllinoise\u201d team about the music, Richardson\u2019s death derailed his participation, company members said. (Through a representative, Stevens declined an interview request.)<\/p>\n The composer and musician Timo Andres<\/a> \u2014 also a previous Stevens collaborator \u2014 created the arrangements, which include interludes from the album that have not been performed live, Andres said.<\/p>\n For the stage version, he tried to keep the DIY spirit of the recording, which was made with many of Stevens\u2019s friends, often in ad hoc studios around New York. It\u2019s \u201cquite orchestral, but also quite intimate and quite homespun,\u201d Andres said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The music also has a grand lushness, he said, as though it wanted to expand beyond its aural container: \u201cIt\u2019s like hearing the New York Philharmonic in a high school gym or something. It\u2019s bursting at the seams.\u201d<\/p>\n Even in a production of this size, he couldn\u2019t match some of the album sounds (\u201cWe\u2019re not going to hire four oboe players just for this one moment\u201d), so he relies on the musicians, who perform onstage, to convey the complexity with multiple instruments.<\/p>\n Nova plays the electric guitar and sings, along with Elijah Lyons and Tasha Viets-VanLear. The vocalists wear translucent, multicolor butterfly wings, in homage to the costumes on the \u201cIllinois\u201d tour. (A creative polymath, Stevens stitched those wings himself, out of kites, Nova said.)<\/p>\n In some ways, Nova is the institutional memory of \u201cIllinoise.\u201d But decoupling this performance from her experience making songs like the piercing \u201cJohn Wayne Gacy, Jr.\u201d<\/a> with Stevens \u2014 \u201cI remember crying at that recording session with him,\u201d she said \u2014 has been intense, especially as she worries about her friend after his traumatic year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What has helped is connection with the dancers \u2014 the singers often lock eyes with them, which she called \u201cthrilling\u201d \u2014 and the realization that the music can endure, apart from Stevens.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, you can\u2019t even look at the audiences because as far as we can see, people are crying,\u201d Nova said. \u201cThis is why we all come to theater, is just to have a space to feel feelings that we don\u2019t see or can\u2019t express in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n For Peck, translating the details of this beloved but complicated album into dance and narrative left him wondering how literal to make certain moments. The creators erred on the side of legibility: During \u201cCasimir Pulaski Day,\u201d<\/a> which references \u201ccancer of the bone,\u201d the dancer Gaby Diaz<\/a> appears with an IV bag and her partner (Ben Cook<\/a>) rends his chest.<\/p>\n \u201cThis show is a little scary for me because it does explore darker themes and darker experiences,\u201d said Peck, noting that his choreography often hums with elation instead. (\u201cIt\u2019s kind of annoying, actually \u2014 even if I try to not put that in, instinctually, it just, like, filters into it.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But in one of his last conversations with Stevens about the project, the musician reminded him to peel back the layers of the album \u2014 \u201cthis bright joyous thing\u201d \u2014 and lean into its depths.<\/p>\n