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Feeling the Illinoise, This Time Through Movement
Sufjan Stevens’s album becomes a transcendent theater-dance-music piece.
On a beautifully wide-open set by Adam Rigg—with upside-down pine trees hanging playfully overhead, and a surround of steelwork scaffolding that brings to mind —a cast carrying backpacks and notebooks comes together somewhere in a field to tell stories around a campfire. This story-club format allows for songs that exist with more insularity on Stevens’s musical tour 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 human capacity for monstrousness; Jeanette Delgado fends off an army of American patriarchs, characterized as the lurching undead, in “They Are Night Zombies!! On the set’s steel-beamed scaffolding, they stand above the action like counterculture guardian angels, Nova’s brilliant neon orange mane flashing in the lights, their trio of distinctive voices braiding and unbraiding through Stevens’s wry, ruminative lyrics.
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