Unpicking Justin Peck

Stealing time out of Justin Peck’s day is a tricky feat. Dialling in to an early morning interview with the New York choreographer, the publicist facilitating the call reminds me, politely but efficiently, that our time is limited. Our interview is just one of several booked this morning; a small queue of journalists is lining up to catch a few minutes with one of the dance world’s fastest rising stars.

A brief survey of Peck’s résumé offers ample justification for the hype. At the age of just 34 (he turns 35 in September), the choreographer has made over 50 works, both inside and outside the classical canon, spanning everything from original pieces for major companies like the Paris Opera Ballet, to mainstage Broadway revivals, to Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of West Side Story.

At New York City Ballet, where Peck is Resident Choreographer – the youngest and only the second person to ever hold the title – his choreographies now sit alongside the company’s great forefathers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Critical acclaim has been voluminous, with New York Times’s chief dance critic once declaring that Peck was the “third important choreographer to have emerged in classical ballet this century”, after heavyweights Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky. Certainly the trophy cabinet – among it a Bessie and Tony – supports this conclusion.

Acutely aware of his celebrity before our interview, I’m expecting to greet a personality as big as the accolades. But when Peck’s face pops up on the screen, his humility is disarming. He speaks earnestly and matter-of-factly, as someone much less aware of their successes. There’s an energy too; a youthfulness reminding you that, despite a long CV, his career is still taking off.

It’s the end of a long day in the studio for Peck down at the Lincoln Center in New York. He tells me he’s been rehearsing a new work for Vail Dance Festival – a major event in America’s summer dance calendar – while simultaneously staging, not one, but three of his works for NYCB’s spring season. On the other side of the summer break (“hopefully there’s a little bit of time off”, laughs Peck), two more of his works will grace New York’s stages, with further productions in Houston and Australia.

More than 20 of Peck’s creations have been made for NYCB – the choreographer’s “home” for the better part of his dancing life. Raised in San Diego, California, Peck’s relationship to New York was forged through dance, picking up a pair of tap shoes at the age of nine after seeing tap icon Savion Glover perform on Broadway during an annual family trip to the American east coast. With healthy encouragement from his parents, Peck’s passion for dance flourished and, at the age of 15, he moved to New York to train at the prestigious School of American Ballet.

“There are generations of my family history in this city, but my own way of arriving here was through dance,” reflects Peck. “I got here just as I was finding myself as an independent person, so a lot of things at that time were very impressionable, like the kind of dance I could see. Works by Balanchine and Robbins, where the emphasis was really placed on the interrelation between music and movement, were a big influence. I didn’t really know that dance could be just that and I was really curious to learn more.”

Though it would be a few more years before Peck officially embraced the title of  “choreographer”, his career as a dancer with NYCB, which began as an apprentice in 2006 and later as a soloist, gave him a front row seat to observe – and dance – the company’s most iconic repertoire. When Peck finally made his first work in 2009, the influence of Balanchine’s musicality and architectural design, together with the pop-culture concerns of Robbins, were undeniable.

But rather than recycling these ideas, Peck’s artistic voice stands confidently on its own. His classical work is breathtakingly fresh; reviving the form by dialling up the energy to full volume and melding it with movement inspired by everyday actions. Several of his ballets are performed in sneakers and bomber jackets, while others splice tap steps and complex rhythmic patterning with unrelenting sequences of grand allegro.

But most of all, Peck’s works are characterised by the conversations they create between music and movement. The choreographer is known to sit with a piece of music for a long time before entering the studio – for his 2022 work, Partita, Peck listened to the score for nearly a decade. Each composition’s structure is methodically studied; its layers excavated to find new interpretations and possibilities for movement.

Whose music Peck interprets is therefore a critical factor in shaping the work he makes. American indie composer and multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens is one of Peck’s most important collaborators, writing original compositions for some of the choreographer’s most successful ballets. It’s a collaborative relationship of the truest kind.

“Every collaboration is different, but with Sufjan, his music pushes me into creative territory that is the most extended of what I feel like I can do,” says Peck. “He will write musical ideas – maybe one or two minutes long – and I’ll tell him which ones to build up into a full movement. In the end, I make a kind of ‘playlist’ from these musical ideas and shape them into a structure in which the dance can happen. Throughout this process, meaning and anecdote start to reveal themselves.”

This building-block approach is echoed in Peck’s method of finding the movement vocabulary. Peck will spend hours experimenting with endless bursts of physical ideas, recording these sketches on film, some of which are shared with followers on social media. Watching these clips reveals the intense musicality of his movement and how meticulously he maps a particular score with his body. These “Legos”, as Peck calls them, are the foundations, eventually built out – like Stevens’ compositions – into a full work.

Everywhere We Go is a notable example of these collaborations. When it is staged by the Australian Ballet this year it will be the first time the work has been performed outside NYCB. A nine-part ballet for 25 dancers, on its premiere in 2014 the New York Times labelled it “a work both diffuse and brilliant whose rich supply of configurations, phrases and rhythms often (if not always) suggests that young Mr. Peck can do anything he wants with choreography: a virtuoso of the form.”

Dazzled by the work’s energetics, critics described the movement in Everywhere We Go as “a breath of life”. It’s a common refrain attached to Peck’s work. So where does all this energy come from?

“Honestly, it mostly comes from a very raw place: when a human hears music they want to dance. I think the energy in my work is a way of harnessing that instinct and articulating it.”

Dates: Melbourne Sep 23–Oct 1 and Sydney November 10–26.

This article first appeared in the July/Aug/Sep issue of 'Dance Australia'. Did you miss your copy? Just go here to subscribe.