In 2009, Justin Peck choreographed his first work for Columbia University’s student ballet troupe. It was four minutes long and had two dancers. “Not bad for a first attempt,” The New York Times wrote in a four-sentence review. “Let’s see where he goes.”

In six years, pretty damn far.

Now 28, Peck has become the hottest choreographic commodity in the ballet world, racking up original ballet commissions for the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Guggenheim Museum, the Miami City Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the L.A. Dance Project, to name a few. One of these works, Year of the Rabbit, was nominated for a Benois de la Danse award (essentially the ballet Oscars). In 2014, he became the subject of a Tribeca Film Festival documentary, Ballet 422, and was appointed the resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet. The only other person to have held this position is Christopher Wheeldon, who went on to choreograph the Tony Award–winning musical An American in Paris.

This week, Peck has another career highlight : his 28th work, and his first piece ever for the San Francisco Ballet.

In the Countenance of Kings bears little resemblance to his scrappy Columbia days—“It will premiere in an opera house of somewhere around 3,000 seats, has a full orchestra, around 65 musicians playing the score live, and 18 dancers,” Peck says—but it’s also far from a traditional ballet.

For one thing, the music is by indie rocker Sufjan Stevens—a name you might expect to see on a Lollapalooza lineup, not a Lincoln Center marquee. This is Peck’s third collaboration with the artist.

“I do some of my best work to his music. I just find it very inspiring on a personal level,” says Peck. “He’s naturally a very curious artist.” Case in point: Stevens drew inspiration for Kings’ score from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, of all things. “There are so many beautiful things about Brooklyn, and then he picked the ugliest, most congested thing to work with,” Peck says, laughing.

And then there’s the costumes—modern, sleek, and casual. Even the promotional video for Kings, which doesn’t make use of the show’s official costumes, features dancers in sneakers.

All of this may be surprising to those outside the dance world—aren’t ballets supposed to be set to 19th-century Russian scores and have lots of tutus? But for those who have been following Peck, its all part of his M.O.