Ruth Leon’s New York theatre Pocket Review

Illinoise at mes Theatre 

Illinoise is a storybook in dance form. A large cast sits around a campfire and each initiates a danced story. Each unrelated story – one about friendship, another about John Wayne Gacy, another about a love affair that goes sour, several others – is told not with dialogue but with gesture and movement.

Three fine singers take on the vocal accompaniment of songs by Sufjan Stevens which, if you can understand them, tell the stories in lyrics, and an excellent, widely varied, on-stage orchestra does the job of illuminating the stories with music.

Justin Peck is a great ballet choreographer but the modern dance vocabulary he uses here is repetitious and narrow. In contrast with his expansive and exquisite dances for Carousel several seasons ago where he used the full range of ballet and modern dance choreography for his ballet-trained dancers, here he limits himself to a small repertoire of ‘music video’ movements, giving his talented but mostly non-ballet dancers little scope to stretch themselves within the stories.

Once I’d ‘got’ the emotional point of each story and/or the narrative, I found myself watching the musicians far more than the dancers because the dance steps and sequences he uses are too similar to one another to differentiate between them.

In addition to the choreography, Peck is credited with co-writing the book for Illinoise, with Pulitzer Award-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. This is brave but not entirely successful as, using oft-repeated sequences of movements for different segments makes the storytelling fuzzy. Clearly, early audiences found the show confusing so the programme contains a booklet purporting  to be the leading character’s rationale for the show’s frame.    There is also a butterfly theme here with the singers wearing butterfly wings but the reason for that escapes me.

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