Joni Mitchell wants you to save the world
This is a ballet that wants to change the world. At least, if Joni Mitchell: The Fiddle & The Drum is a ballet. Loaded with overtly political and environmental themes, along with a mélange of dance styles, including contemporary, urban, neoclassical and African, even its co-creator has a hard time defining the show.
“It’s not really a ballet, but it is a ballet. It’s an athletic tour de force. It’s a hybrid between contemporary ballet and a musical. Joni calls it a spectacle of athletic pageantry,” says acclaimed choreographer and Alberta Ballet’s artistic director Jean Grand-Maitre. “Physically, this is probably the most demanding show I’ve ever choreographed. It’s just relentless.”
In 2005, while the famously reclusive Mitchell was putting the finishing touches on a mixed-media show of canvas triptychs depicting wars and revolutions, she was approached by Grand-Maitre, who was interested in producing a ballet based on her life and popular music. It was tentatively entitled Dancing Joni.
“With our situation for all earthlings — man and animals — becoming so dire, I felt that it was frivolous to present a lighter fare,” says Mitchell, adding that to do so “would have been like fiddling while Rome burned.” After a marathon late-night creative session, she agreed to collaborate with Grand-Maitre on a reworked concept. Two years later, the resulting ballet debuted in Calgary to rave reviews and sold-out venues across Canada. Media critics called the show, “one of the decade’s most significant art events.”
Below large-scale projections of political and ecological fallout, dozens of gorgeously athletic, stripped-down dancers leap and spin, pulling together and pushing apart with captivating intensity. Eerie red and green images of guns and flags spasm on a round canvas screen, while dancers don green metal flak helmets and gradually crumple to the ground. Despite all these heavy themes, the piece is astoundingly hopeful, says Grand-Maitre.
“It’s not about bashing people on the head with these questions and leaving them depressed,” he says, noting that Mitchell has consistently said she wants audiences to have a good night out. “The songs’ lyrics sing about suicide, genocide, and environmental disasters, but then you see these gorgeous dancers. This contrast, in the end, tells us there’s so much beauty we can create.”
Upcoming January performances of the ballet, which takes its name from an anti-war song from Mitchell’s popular record Clouds, heralds the start of Cultural Olympiad 2010. It will feature four new songs by the Saskatchewan native, including Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a reinterpretation of The Second Coming, Yeats’ classic poem on war and stoicism. Grand-Maitre says Mitchell has called the performance the most exciting project of her career, which he says is, “a big deal.”
“Joni wanted this to be the ballet that would inspire people to do something for the environment, to be aware that things can be done to help this horrible situation we’re in, and to question the place of war and aggression between nations in this day and age” he says. “It’s basically a work that’s trying to inspire people to make change.”
“Joni Mitchell: The Fiddle & The Drum” runs from January 22 to 24 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Hamilton Street at West Georgia;(604) 280-3311, tickets from $20 to $89.
