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, the singer-songwriter-producer Sufjan Stevens. He’d heard an orchestral suite Stevens had written, The BQE, and thought this was perfect music for dance. “So I just wrote: ‘Hey, if you would ever want to collaborate or, you know, make a dance or make a 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, entirely set to the music of, you’ve guessed it, Sufjan Stevens, specifically his 2005 album, Illinois. Not such a pipe dream after all, it turns out. Billed as “a new kind of musical”, Illinoise (as the stage version is titled) has no dialogue, but a story told through song lyrics and the dancers’ movement, “almost like a silent film”, says Peck.
