“They trust themselves more than actors do,” Jerome Robbins once wrote of dancers. “Dancers know they will make it their own. Actors have the complication of wanting to make it their own, and their horror of exposing what their own is. Dancers always reveal themselves.”
But the dancers in “Illinoise,” Justin Peck’s reimagining of Sufjan Stevens’s adventurous concept album “Illinois” (2005), are in a knotty situation. In the show, now at the Park Avenue Armory, the dancers are also the actors. And rarely does it feel like they are revealing facets of themselves — or showing the clarity that radiates through unaffected dancing.
Instead their performances are a bizarre hybrid. They act out the dancing and dance out the acting. They struggle with both, partly because of their daunting task: Turning their very adult selves into younger selves on the cusp of adulthood. Even the dewier-looking ones have trouble. How could they not? Peck has them bouncing between giddiness and angst, with little in between.
It’s hard to pin down what “Illinoise” wants to be, though it clearly has Broadway ambitions. Is it the musical theater version of a story ballet? A concert with dancing? Does it even care about dancing, really? The show, referred to as “A New Kind of Musical,” has little that seems new; it’s drowning in sentimentality, which is about as old school as it gets. And it doesn’t have much of a story, but what is there — by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury — is opaque. There’s no dialogue. It’s the music that is the undisputed star here.
With new arrangements by the composer Timo Andres, and featuring three fine vocalists, the music carries the production, often leaving the dancers with little to do but mirror the lyrics. It’s exhausting to watch them sweat through this choreography. “Illinoise” is another attempt by Peck to build a community through dancing bodies, but the community is too delicate, too self absorbed for real connection.
Peck, the resident choreographer of New York City Ballet, has been creating community dances that smell like teen spirit for ages. But what started out as a choreographic signature, in which he drew on the talents of ballet dancers around his own age, has become tired. His choreography, especially since the pandemic, has lost its way, its beat, its spine. He has made fine dances, fresh and alive; “The Times Are Racing” (2017) feels like it poured out of him; its heart and drive remain unassailable.
When “Illinoise” picks up momentum and the dancers perform as a group, breathing as one, some of that fiery groove shines through. Those moments are fleeting, but they speak to the glimmering spirit of what “Illinoise” might have been had dance been granted more power. For all its in-you-face presence, it is more of a side hustle here than a tool to get the job done.
Peck is known for the rigor of his structure, but he has allowed a sameness to seep in: Often in his works, dancers converge in tight formations — like a mid-dance huddle — and then spill out onto the stage. A similar thing happens in “Illinoise” again and again as the group gathers around a campfire (an arrangement of lanterns) and then trickles off, clearing the stage for a new scene. It feels like church camp.
With this music, the lens is focused on a specific time, one that seems personal to Peck, whose quest for nirvana — not the Nirvana of the ’90s, but the wistful blissing out of the aughts — frequently lands him in a place of overflowing emotion. His cast projects adolescence, with its inherent depth of feeling, but without the theatrical glue it needs: tension.
The movement in “Illinoise” is vague, placing more importance on shapes than on fully dimensional choreography. You could swear you’re watching dancing, but is it? What is it? Sometimes ambiguous, sometimes literal — with gestures reflecting lyrics — the active dancing, along with everyday, pedestrian movement, can seem both contrived and predictable. When the lead character of Henry (Ricky Ubeda) pulls on a jacket that immediately falls off — this happens at the show’s start and finish — you see it coming.
There are rounded backs and deep pliés, the kind that help a surfer get up on a board, as well as punchy unison moments that involve, repeatedly, pulled up knees with a backward lean and a hulking step forward. Swirls on sneaker tips, toe drags, heel pivots — they don’t come together as a choreographic language, but as movement that a stylist might drape on a body for theatrical effect.
Journaling is a theme of the production, which delves into issues around mental health; the program features journal entries, written by Drury, illustrating Henry’s thoughts. “I’m worried I’m still a child,” she writes as Henry, letting “nervous thoughts rule more often than I’d like to admit.”
In the first act, journals placed at the front of the stage seem to be the inspiration for dancing out Stevens’s songs. When Craig Salstein appears in a clown costume as John Wayne Gacy, to the tune of “John Wayne Gacy Jr.,” his expression becomes full of rage as he knocks the others down with systematic coldness. To another song, the dancer Jeanette Delgado battles zombies and runs in place — more than once.
And Robbie Fairchild, in “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” transforms from Clark Kent to Superman with hands proudly on his hips. These are all accomplished dancers, but they can’t elevate choreography that seems reminiscent of 1980s music videos.
“Illinoise” owes much to “Movin’ Out,” Twyla Tharp’s musical, set to Billy Joel’s songs and orchestral pieces, about a generation of young Americans in the 1960s and their experience during and after the Vietnam War. And it seems beholden to a star of that show, John Selya, a Tharp muse and real-life surfer. Selya’s groundedness, his casual-athletic approach to the curves and bends of movement struck me time and again as blueprint for the vocabulary of “Illinoise.”
Bodies swoop and swoon — seemingly driven more by emotional energy than by steps. But aren’t steps what makes a dance breathe? Is that why this show feels so stunted? With its reaching arms, sharp kicks, yearning eyes and hungry smiles, the dance is hardly a dance at all, but the desperate backup act of “Illinoise.”
Robbins, too, is an important Peck influence, and a choreographer who worked wonders with the idea of youthful, energized kid-style ballets. He was also a master of two realms, dance and theater. In “Illinoise,” Peck waters down both, but particularly what he should be most in control of — the choreography.