Peck began his career as a dancer but has been making waves as a choreographer. Photograph by Andreas Laszlo Konrath for The New Yorker

Right now, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of excellent ballet dancers in the United States, but interesting ballet choreographers are very, very rare. Of those who regularly show their work on these shores, only three are in the top tier: Alexei Ratmansky, the artist-in-residence at American Ballet Theatre; Christopher Wheeldon, the artistic associate of London’s Royal Ballet; and Mark Morris, who now and then takes time off from being the country’s foremost modern-dance choreographer to give us a ballet. In the past few years, though, one reason to go to New York City Ballet has been to watch a new choreographic talent, Justin Peck, inching upward.

Peck joined City Ballet, as a dancer, in 2007, when he was nineteen. The following year, he took a dance-criticism course at Barnard, and his professor, Mindy Aloff, suggested to him that he might be good at choreography. He had an analytical mind, she said. So he made his first ballet, the nicely titled “A Teacup Plunge,” for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, a small group at the university. By 2012, he was working on his first piece for New York City Ballet, and after that you couldn’t stop him. In 2014, when he supplied the big, happy, shot-from-guns “Everywhere We Go” as the climax of N.Y.C.B.’s spring gala, he was named the company’s resident choreographer. He is now twenty-eight, and he has produced twenty-eight ballets, ten of them for N.Y.C.B.

Two years ago, Peck was the subject of a movie, “Ballet 422,” which showed him, over a period of two months, creating N.Y.C.B.’s four-hundred-and-twenty-second ballet, “Paz de la Jolla,” set to the music of Bohuslav Martinů. In the seventy-five minutes of the film, he did almost nothing but work on the ballet in the studio, work on the ballet at home, and ride the subway between those two locations. He didn’t eat; he didn’t chat with a friend or call his mother. That may have been entirely the director’s decision, but I doubt it. Amazingly, he has not quit dancing. (In “Ballet 422,” he goes down to his dressing room after his ballet’s première, puts on makeup, and goes back upstairs to dance in someone else’s ballet.) He says that having a full-time dancing job makes it easier for him to refuse outside choreography commissions, which he now must do. He also says that there are ballets at N.Y.C.B. that he hasn’t yet danced in, and wants to. As he sees it, you can never really know a ballet unless you’ve performed it. He is terrifically serious. Though he looks and moves like a teen-ager—he does uptalk, he has made a ballet for an iPad app—his demeanor is habitually grave. He often keeps his face tilted downward, with his large brown eyes peeking upward at the people in front of him, as if he didn’t want them to know all that’s on his mind. Giving an instruction, he says that if that doesn’t work he has a Plan B. I’ll bet he has a Plan C, too.

The quality that the audience seems to love most in his work is its sheer oomph: speed, vigor, exuberance. If I’m not mistaken, he especially likes choreographing for men, and the sight of all those big, well-trained thighs launching themselves into the air in unison is indeed impressive. He also tends to work with dancers his own age, which means not just that they’re young and strong but that they know him personally and want to give him what he asks for. Another of his choreographic virtues is an extraordinary skill with groups. Mother Nature does not know more patterns than Justin Peck does: circles and spirals and triangles and grids and arrows and rickrack and pearls on a string. When he gets these shapes forming and dissolving and re-forming at high speed, in response to the patterns in the music—and he likes his music complicated, with overlapping patterns of fives and elevens and the like—you really have something to look at.

You don’t necessarily have a ballet, though, because in most classical dance the central meaning is contained in the pas de deux. Peck has always made boring pas de deux. The problem may have been political—a wish to avoid any suggestion of dominance—or it may have been aesthetic, a dislike of the feat-after-feat structure of many old pas de deux. But, whatever he was avoiding, he wasn’t putting anything substantial in its place. In his duets, an impulse, an idea would no sooner surface than it vanished, and this void, especially when glimpsed alongside the fullness and certainty of his ensemble choreography, made his work look a bit cold, like something that might be produced by a person who could fashion a ballet for an iPad app. He was aware of the problem. In 2013, in an interview with Gia Kourlas, of Time Out, he said that he thought that the piece he was working on was “a bit more human than the last one”—a statement that is very poignant, if it isn’t just plain clueless.

But three years have passed since then. Early this month, Peck unveiled a new ballet, “The Most Incredible Thing,” and it contains an extremely moving pas de deux. This is Peck’s first story ballet, and its plot, taken from Hans Christian Andersen, is standard fairy-tale business: the king will give half his kingdom, plus the hand of the beautiful princess, to the young man who can do “the most incredible thing.” The premier contestant, called the Creator (Taylor Stanley), produces a marvellous cuckoo clock. On the stroke of one, a cuckoo (Tiler Peck, no relation) appears; on two, we see our two parents, Adam and Eve (Rebecca Krohn and Adrian Danchig-Waring); on three, the Three Kings; and so on. These entries are the occasion of most of the numbers in the ballet. But, as part of the pageant, the Creator and the princess (the wonderful Sterling Hyltin) come together for a duet that seems a kind of itinerary of love. She goes up on point and slides across the stage, as if losing control; she tilts forward perilously, as if looking over the edge of the world. She charges into the air, toward us, in a huge supported split; the Creator whirls her around on his neck; then she falls forward into a “fish” (a head-first diagonal fall, stopped by her partner). She has fallen in love, but the power is not unequal, and the structure is not a now-this-now-that lockstep but an organic progression, a big pink explosion.

Unfortunately, the duet comes in completely the wrong place in the ballet: it’s near the beginning, when, with its message of culmination, it should be at the end. And at the end, or near it, there’s a completely different duet, for the princess and a character called the Destroyer (Amar Ramasar), who demolishes the clock and almost wins the contest. To make matters worse, the pas de deux for the Destroyer and the princess is another love duet, but of a perverse and disturbing kind. The Destroyer’s right arm ends not in a hand but in a long silver club, which he threads through her limbs. It’s a weapon, of course, and a phallic symbol—it has an appalling sort of bulb at its tip—but it is also a magic wand. This man wants that princess, and, from the look of things, she may sort of want him, too, a little bit. Although the Creator wins, it’s a close call.

The ballet is Peck’s biggest ever: forty-four minutes long, with a cast of fifty-six. The score, by the folk-rock-plus composer Bryce Dessner, has tickings and gear-grindings and borrowings from Philip Glass. The sets and the costumes, by the Canadian artist Marcel Dzama, are full of grotesque fancies; they are, in fact, the ballet’s strongest element. There’s a suit that contains two men, and another that’s a grass shack—which is not to mention the Destroyer’s arm. But the dark spirit is not just Dzama’s; it’s been there in a number of Peck’s ballets. (He once made a piece inspired by murder ballads.) When it turns up, you’re glad to see it. A note of ugliness amid ballet’s insistent beauty, a little nightmare now and then: it’s always a good sign. ♦