Feeling the Illinoise, This Time Through Movement

From Illinoise, astatine the Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger

The past clip I listened to Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 indie opus Illinois consecutive through, I was biking crossed the confederate extremity of that state, crossing the flat, snaking Mississippi floodplain, thinking astir Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The time before—the time erstwhile she died—my spouse and I had ridden 108 miles, the archetypal period successful our quest to rhythm crossed America. “Oh, God of Progress,” Sufjan sang successful my earbuds arsenic I pedaled past immense swaths of soybeans, “have you degraded oregon forgot us? Where person your laws gone? I deliberation astir it now.”

I’ve got “Chicago,” the cardinal anthemic banger from Illinois, perpetually connected shuffle, but it takes a conscious affectional committedness to acquisition the medium from opening to end. Stevens’s euphony is sweeping and many-splendored, arsenic affluent successful its orchestrations arsenic it is earthy successful its emotion. It’s not Kurt Cobain oregon Jeff Mangum raw, but thing antithetic — Stevens isn’t tearing unfastened his thorax and dumping the entrails out. He’s mildly unpicking the stitching supra his sternum, opening the rib cage arsenic with a jeweled key, and letting retired a swarm of butterflies. If you’re going to driblet the needle connected “Concerning the UFO Sighting adjacent Highland, Illinois” and support listening each the mode done the rolling, repeating small bells astatine the extremity of “Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals arsenic I Run,” you’ve got to beryllium acceptable to, arsenic the medium screen says, “Come connected consciousness the Illinoise.” And this is the existent triumph of the caller amusement built by Stevens, manager and choreographer Justin Peck, and playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury astir the epic blueprint of the album: Beyond its galore method glories, and its fewer little stumbles, Illinoise achieves a holistic transcendence. For 90 glorious minutes, you do feel. Irony and cynicism slink distant with their tails betwixt their legs. The show’s bonzer corps of dancers, musicians, and singers throws unfastened a model to the cosmos, and we each crook similar bare wintering plants toward the sun.

The infinitesimal I realized determination would beryllium nary spoken dialog successful Illinoise was the infinitesimal I knew Peck and Drury were taking america determination wonderful. While it’s earthy capable for a choreographer with Peck’s grooming and pedigree to anchor a portion successful question (he’s a Tony winner, helium choreographed Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and helium danced with the New York City Ballet, wherever he’s present resident choreographer), it takes a peculiar assurance for a playwright, adjacent 1 with a Pulitzer, to say: You cognize what? No request for words. This is tanztheater, and though it hews person to navigable crippled than immoderate of the masterworks of the contented (Pina Bausch’s, for instance), it’s inactive functioning from a spot of ecstatic religion successful the body. That and the euphony volition archer america everything we request to know.

Drury and Peck are credited with “Story” for Illinoise, and they’ve accounted for some the picaresque qualities of Stevens’s medium and for its affectional coherency by crafting a communicative astir narratives. On a beautifully wide-open acceptable by Adam Rigg—with upside-down conifer trees hanging playfully overhead, and a situation of steelwork scaffolding that brings to caput these guys having lunch—a formed carrying backpacks and notebooks comes unneurotic determination successful a tract to archer stories astir a campfire. This story-club format allows for songs that beryllium with much insularity connected Stevens’s philharmonic circuit of the Prairie State: Alejandro Vargas dances an eerie duet with a clown during “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” a delicate, disturbing lament that ponders the quality capableness for monstrousness; Jeanette Delgado fends disconnected an service of American patriarchs, characterized arsenic the lurching undead, successful “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!” (“They tremble with the tense thought / Of having been, astatine last, forgot,” spell the lyrics.) And Rachel Lockhart and Byron Tittle execute a stunning duet to “Jacksonville,” arsenic Lockhart’s character—moving with the brushed easiness and specificity of ballet, and with the nervus and bushed of thoroughfare dance—encounters a tap-dancing ancestor. Tittle’s dancing is magnificent: This isn’t pat arsenic quaint Broadway diversion. It’s pat arsenic athletic, virtuosic heritage, some carnal and spiritual.

We know, however, arsenic we spell connected these idiosyncratic journeys, that a cardinal storyline awaits us. A quality called Henry (Ricky Ubeda, who channels grief with existent grace), is hovering astir the edges of the communicative circle. His comrades support encouraging him to share, but helium can’t rather bring himself to measurement forward. It’s wide he’s carrying thing dense and fragile, and that his communicative volition instrumentality america done the rising waves of Stevens’s suite of songs, crossed its climax and toward its conclusion.

For those who crave a small much clarity (and emotion a souvenir), the programme for Illinoise has been tucked wrong an illustrated mentation of Henry’s journal, its substance written by Drury and its hand-lettering and doodles created by Joanna Neborsky. It’s a beauteous object, but the explicit links that it makes betwixt Henry’s communicative and the lyrics of Stevens’s songs aren’t truly necessary: We tin spot and perceive it each connected the stage. The communicative Henry volition yet archer america has to bash with the nonaccomplishment of a friend, Carl (beautifully danced by the lithe, fairy-prince-like Ben Cook). It’s besides a coming-out communicative and a leaving-home story. “I drove to New York / In a van, with my friend,” ringing retired the lyrics to the pulsing, yearning “Chicago.” “We slept successful parking tons / I don’t mind, I don’t caput / I was successful emotion with the spot / In my mind, successful my caput / I made a batch of mistakes / In my mind, successful my mind.”

The communicative of however Henry loses Carl is besides the communicative of however helium finds Douglas (Ahmad Simmons, gentle and radiant), his archetypal existent big person and the calm affirmation to the anxious, fluttering psyche bottled up wrong his Midwestern body. The duets betwixt Ubeda and Cook, Ubeda and Simmons, and betwixt Cook and Gaby Diaz—playing the miss Carl loves, adjacent arsenic his person Henry softly pines for him—are exquisite exchanges of energy, from the playful to the tragic. During “Casimir Pulaski Day,” truthful devastating successful its soft, banjo-driven prettiness, Cook and Diaz repetition a question successful which they scope up together, past Diaz slips done Cook’s arms, crashing to the floor. Over and implicit again we ticker him neglect to clasp onto her; we spot her becoming little and little solid. There’s thing heartbreaking successful witnessing dancers astatine the highest of their form—their bodies specified gorgeous machines, truthful wholly almighty and controlled—channeling carnal breakdown, weakness, illness, and death. “All the glory that the Lord has made” inevitably comes to this: “And helium takes, and helium takes, and helium takes.”

Last October, Sufjan Stevens dedicated his caller album, Javelin, to his partner, Evans Richardson, who died successful April. Mourning his person was besides the archetypal clip the vocalist spoke publically astir his sexuality. Even if Ubeda and Simmons didn’t carnivore an echoing resemblance to Stevens and Richardson—and they do—it would beryllium intolerable not to consciousness the value of that nonaccomplishment moving done Illinoise. The show’s 3 singers further transmission Stevens by wearing colorful, moth-like wings, a costume portion he’s been known to deterioration successful concert, successful variously heightened forms. (Stevens himself isn’t onstage successful Illinoise; he’s conscionable everyplace wrong it.) Those singers—Elijah Lyons, Tasha Viets-VanLear, and Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond—are arsenic transporting arsenic the show’s dancers. On the set’s steel-beamed scaffolding, they basal supra the enactment similar counterculture guardian angels, Nova’s superb neon orangish mane flashing successful the lights, their trio of distinctive voices braiding and unbraiding done Stevens’s wry, ruminative lyrics. Much has been made of Stevens’s religiosity—is helium Christian? Are his songs? And truthful on—but Illinoise makes wide what the euphony itself ever has: Whatever Stevens’s idiosyncratic background, immoderate the spiritual vocabulary of his writing, his creation reaches for a consciousness of worship and anticipation that eschews labels, limits, and exclusions.

Trumpets and woodwinds successful my ears, the flat, blistery asphalt of an Illinois backroad nether my tires, miles and miles of sky, the 2020 predetermination 45 days away. “All things spell … All things grow,” sang Sufjan. Now, successful different world, successful the aforesaid aged world, Illinoise sings on. May it permission down seeds for much theatre that dances, virtually oregon figuratively, with specified joyful abandon.

Illinoise is astatine the Park Avenue Armory done March 26.

Fans proceed to reason astir whether Stevens intended the archetypal album’s rubric to person a last “e.” Both spellings look connected the artwork.