When else would a Sufjan Stevens show open with Kristen Bell singing a song from a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical? The whole opening night of “Everywhere We Go”—the new ballet scored by Stevens and choreographed by dance wunderkind Justin Peck, which the New York City Ballet premiered at Lincoln Center last night—was a series of unlikely pairings that improbably made sense by the end.
The first movement (“The Shadows Will Fall Behind”) began with a string of solo piano notes, and six male dancers in grey and black, and almost immediately sounded distinctly Sufjan from the first swell of woodwinds and brass, which looped and repeated a melody so that they almost sounded like a voice singing it. It was simultaneously jubilant and chaotic, sweet melodies interspersed with dramatic thumps of drums and brass as the dancers marched menacingly.
As they adapted their movements to each mutation of the music, it became clear that this is logical project for Stevens, even if he’s a non-classical musician and self-professed former ballet-hater. (“Ballet [once] seemed so anachronistic, so formal and classical and archaic and irrelevant to pop culture, the world of YouTube and reality television,” Stevens recently told the New York Times. “I didn’t understand it.”)
So much of Stevens’ music is already orchestral, most notably 2010’s The Age of Adz, where the title track begins ominously with a swell of woodwinds and horns. But it wasn’t just the instrumentation that sounded like Stevens. The same weird chord progressions that cast a theme of doomed hopefulness over Stevens’ work, from his quiet folk songs to his grander, louder pieces, was present here. Just when things start to get dark in a Sufjan Stevens song, he’ll throw in a wink of humor to add some levity, in the form of an unusual sound or beat.
The fourth movement (“To Live in the Hearts We Leave Behind”), for example, began with somber harp so quiet you could hear the dancers’ soft steps. They were moving so slowly it felt almost like the moment was not in real time. The music escalated slowly and dramatically, like a film score, but then, unexpectedly, a lilting horn piped in, puncturing tiny holes in the sad balloon of the song until it deflated, and faded out with the quiet harp again.
Then things got really happy: The fifth movement (“There is Always the Sunshine”) mashed up plucking piano and percussion with maracas, and the audience laughed as a ballerina nonchalantly leapt up to be hoisted by the group, settling on her side with a subtle wink.
How we ended up here involves a string of artistic inspirations and creative leaps. “Everywhere We Go” is Peck and Stevens’ second collaboration. Their first was 2012’s “Year of the Rabbit,” which Peck was inspired to do after hearing string adaptations of Stevens’ music on WNYC. The string pieces were part of the 2009 album Run Rabbit Run, on which the string quartet Osso enlisted a slew of composers to transcribe pieces from Stevens’ 2001 album, “Enjoy Your Rabbit,” his strange foray into electronic music, in the early days of his career. (“It’s this funny little project that won’t die,” Stevens told The Times.)
For “Everywhere We Go,” the coming-together process was less happenstance. Stevens would post song fragments and sketches of movements on piano or guitar to a server, and Peck would listen and show Stevens choreography ideas. It was a dialogue, with each note and step meticulously thought out. It’s nine movements, which don’t tell a story (intentionally), but are united by the repeated melodies and dance movements Peck and Stevens wove in: A series of steady piano notes at the root of a song, for example, or a moment when the dancers lay with their backs on the floor and one leg extended straight up.
Peck got Stevens into ballet, taking him to see Balanchine's 1957 ballet “Agon,” where suddenly things clicked. “It made me understand how selfish and boring it can be to make art that is all about yourself,” Stevens told the Times.
At the end of the last movement (“Thanks to the Human Heart By Which We Live”), a swirling melody seemed to circulate through various instruments before settling on the piano, while the dancers took turns slowly crumbling to the floor, running to catch each other until the last one had fallen. After the heavy gold curtains came down, Stevens emerged on stage, briefly and sheepishly, in a grey t-shirt screen-printed with the front of a tuxedo. Where had he been this whole time? I later asked a label representative, John Beeler, who said: “He was probably ethereally floating somewhere above the audience like a cloud.”