Justin Peck

My philosophy on choreography is that the making of a ballet is a team effort, and we're in this together. It's not me hammering on them. It's more about how we can elevate this piece collectively to something great.

The future of ballet is really in the hands of the creators, so if it's something that interests them to push the envelope with gender roles, then I think it will change. But if that's not of interest to a dance-maker, if their interest is to sort of preserve the way things have been done for the past 200 years, then nothing is going to change.

The reason I started dancing in the first place was my dad took me to see 'Bring In 'da Noise, Bring In 'da Funk' when I was 9.

It's expensive to get studio space and dancers. My whole first three years, I was sneaking around in the studios and getting kicked out of them. It was kind of depressing.

It's probably what I'm most interested in as a choreographer: how I can alter and shift and develop the structure of a piece and of the space.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

When I'm making a new ballet, I usually read through the score a little bit, and then I have to go back and translate or transcribe all the counts for dancers because the way that you hear it is completely different from the way the musicians read and play it.

It's very difficult to switch back and forth between running rehearsals and then stepping in to dance in rehearsals as a dancer. Just to switch hats in an instant can be a little bit jarring, mostly physically, on the body.

There's something refreshing about going to work with a different group of dancers. There are different ways of moving, different ways in which the institution functions. There's a contrast from place to place, so the variety and the experience of working in a different place feeds me.

I think that story ballets, as great as they might sell, they're a really dated and awkward medium to tell stories through. I think there needs to be an updated or different approach to storytelling in dance. There needs to be less of a separation between the storytelling and the dancing.

I've always thought of the process of creating ballets as being this kind of team effort. It's not like being a painter, where you have your paint, and you have canvas, and you just go at it. I'm working with these living, breathing, functioning human beings, and they have their own thoughts and ideas about what works well movement-wise.

I think ballet is pretty open about what music is used, actually.