The ballet contains nine sections: • The Shadows Will Fall Behind • Happiness Is a Perfume • I Breathe the Air of Mountains and Their Unapproachable Heights • To Live in the Hearts We Leave Behind • There Is Always the Sunshine • Every Flower That Stirs the Elastic Sod • I Am in the House and I Have the Key • The Gate of Heaven Is Love • Thanks to the Human Heart by Which We Live The ballet is danced by four principal women, three principal men, three demi-soloist couples, and a
corps de ballet of six men and six women. The ballet is plotless. Dance critic Zoë Anderson called the ballet "full of variety and changing moods." She described "Corps and soloists often overlap, with principals emerging from the group and merging back into it." She also noted, "
Everywhere We Go emphasises the ensemble, which will interrupt duets or spin its own complex patterns. The title suggests a sense of shared community, which also appears in how the dancers interact" For
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet,
Mindy Aloff wrote, "
Everywhere We Go is built on images of community, tribes, and group ritual, but it is cast with an attention to hierarchy," for its division between the
principal dancers and the corps. Aloff noted one of the principal woman, often performed by a taller dancer, never partners with others and "serves as a kind of muse or guiding ideal." Aloff found that "Several sustained
pas de deux present different kinds of relationships." She also observed that "The ballerinas, as in
Balanchine's works, are given real technical challenges, from all parts of the classical lexicon." Both Aloff and Anderson noted a motif in the ballet, which occurs twice, when the dancers are scattered on stage, they begin to fall, but other dancers catch them. Peck explained this scene to Aloff, "There is something shocking and jarring about seeing someone who is healthy have the life leave the body. You remember how fleeting life is and how fragile we are. This is a superhuman ballet, and I wanted to remind the audience that these are human beings—and they're all going to die. But no one hits the ground alone." On the score,
Pitchfork described "it wasn’t just the instrumentation that sounded like Stevens. The same weird chord progressions that cast a theme of doomed hopefulness over Stevens' work, from his quiet folk songs to his grander, louder pieces, was present here. Just when things start to get dark in a Sufjan Stevens song, he’ll throw in a wink of humor to add some levity, in the form of an unusual sound or beat." Like the choreography, there are also motifs in the score, such as "A series of steady piano notes at the root of a song." ==Original cast==