LISTEN HERE: Dancing to Joni Mitchell
Hear music from Alberta Ballet’s The Fiddle & The Drum
Joni Mitchell was the first pop star that Canadian ballet-meister Jean Grand-Maitre pitched to do a ballet. Jean has since done so-called “portrait” ballets about Elton John, Sarah McLachlan, Gordon Lightfoot, k.d. lang, and The Tragically Hip – but Joni was the first.
Ten years ago, the Montreal choreographer set up a meeting and flew to Los Angeles to tell Joni all the details. It would be a based on her life.
“She didn’t like it,” he says. At a Beverly Hills restaurant out on the terrace – so she could smoke, Jean recalls – Joni explained that she was keen on merging dance, music and visual art, but she didn’t like the idea of a ballet being all about her. There were far more important matters to worry about: War, the environment, poverty, corporate greed.
Later on at her house, they began work on what would turn into a two-year labour of love: The result is Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle & The Drum. It made its Alberta Ballet debut in 2006, toured all over, and returns for the 10-Year anniversary show, May 9-11 at the Jubilee Auditorium.
What Jean didn’t know at the time was that Joni had already been thinking about writing a new album. She jumped right in to do a lot of the heavy lifting. In addition to designing the set, and writing the libretto, she recorded four new songs for the project, including a new take of Big Yellow Taxi – a 50-year-old song whose line about “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot” rings extra true today. Others, arranged and orchestrated, contain similarly sobering ideas.
“In Joni’s songs we see beautiful, extraordinary music, and sometimes these lyrics can be painful,” Jean says. “These are eternal songs that capture of the beauty and the pain of being alive. They tell us what we do at our best, and when we’re at our worst. I think the music is going to resonate more today than it did 10 years ago.”
