JONI’S BALLET IS BACK
Piece that started it all is coming to the NAC
Jean Grand-Maitre knew Alberta Ballet had received a significant boost in profile when paparazzi showed up at a Calgary rehearsal.
Well, paparazzo anyway. There was only one. Nonetheless, it was the first and presumably only time this has happened at an Alberta Ballet rehearsal.
It was in 2007 and the artistic director of Alberta Ballet, his company and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell were putting the final touches on The Fiddle & The Drum, the first in a series of portrait ballets the company has created.
The collaboration had garnered international press, something Grand-Maitre wasn’t expecting. The BBC dropped by to do a documentary, focusing on Mitchell’s return to the spotlight after semi-retirement. It helped that she was in fine fighting form, wearing her peace beads and raging against environmental ruin and the war in Iraq. These weighty concerns were reflected in her new paintings and her first new songs since 1998, which would appear later that year on an acclaimed album called Shine. They were also reflected in this new dance piece being developed by Grand-Maitre with Mitchell providing the music, libretto and set design.
It proved irresistible to the international press, including the uninvited photographer.
“We had to kick him out to start our dress rehearsal because Joni Mitchell was back,” said Grand-Maitre. “It was an incredible moment in time. We realized how much attention we were getting.”
The Fiddle & The Drum will arrive Wednesday and Thursday at the National Arts Centre.
After a dozen years, the world has changed. Mitchell suffered a devastating brain aneurysm in 2015 and has made very few public appearances since. Concerns about environmental damage and international conflict have become even more urgent since then.
But on the sunnier side, Alberta Ballet has used The Fiddle & The Drum as a template for nearly half a dozen subsequent portrait ballets, teaming up with k.d.lang, Elton John, Gordon Lightfoot, The Tragically Hip and Sarah McLachlan.
Grand-Maitre is currently in talks with the estate of David Bowie for a new piece based on the late artist’s music, which he hopes to debut in 2022.
“All of them were participants and collaborators in helping me understand their music,” said Grand-Maitre. “Joni was the one who taught me everything. She was my mentor.”
With the exception of 2018’s All of Us, which set an anti-fascist dystopian tale against the songs of the Tragically Hip, the portrait ballets since The Fiddle & The Drum have contained autobiographical elements of its feature artists. This was Grand-Maitre’s initial vision for the Mitchell ballet as well. In 2007, the company was set to celebrate its 40th year and the choreographer, who has been artistic director since 2002, wanted to mark it with something big.
“We were looking for ways to do something spectacular that would really capture the attention of the media and the community and really put Alberta Ballet on the map in a big way,” Grand-Maitre said. “A friend of mine in Toronto, a dance critic, suggested Joni Mitchell because she was actually born in Fort Macleod, Alta., and grew up in Saskatoon. He said she’s a painter so she might design the sets. She might like to work on the creation and I thought it was such a long shot.”
But he had nothing to lose and wrote her agent a letter. Within two weeks, Grand-Maitre was sitting face to face with the singer-songwriter at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. They spent six hours discussing life and “everything imaginable.” They met again in Los Angeles, where Grand-Maitre outlined his idea for a ballet following the broad outlines of Mitchell’s life.
She said she wasn’t interested, but she had a better idea. Initially, Grand-Maitre was crestfallen. But she took him to her Beverly Hills home to play him new songs on piano and guitar and show him her new paintings, most of which dealt with heavy issues of war and the environment. Eventually he saw the light: “Joni Mitchell doesn’t have bad ideas.
“For her, it was useless to do a nice, pretty little ballet about Joni Mitchell’s life when the world is in such shambles,” he said.
Incorporating hip-hop and urban dance movements into a contemporary ballet, the initial 45-minute production was performed by 27 dancers beneath a video installation by Mitchell. The work was expanded in 2009, adding new songs. The Fiddle & The Drum became the focus of a documentary that Mitchell oversaw, which has since developed a cult following. In the past decade, the ballet has been performed in Toronto, Vancouver and California.
“Most importantly, because we started with Joni, it opened the doors for all these other singers,” Grand-Maitre said. “I think a lot of these exciting collaborations would not have been possible if our first muse hadn’t been Joni.”
The portrait ballets have all been popular, helping the company find a new audience while carving out a unique niche. So it’s hardly surprising that Grand-Maitre wants them to continue. He said Alberta Ballet is “95 per cent confirmed to work with the David Bowie estate.
“We are getting very close because of Joni Mitchell,” he said. “I still have to sign on the dotted line. We have a soundtrack selected, a story. Everything has been approved.”
Grand-Maitre has made a few tweaks to The Fiddle & The Drum involving the choreography, but not anything Mitchell contributed. A few weeks ago, he spoke to the singer, who is too weak to travel.
“Joni wanted to make a ballet about what’s going on with this planet and how we are fighting all these wars and the real war should be to save the planet,” Grand-Maitre said. "I think 10 years later, when we’re going to hear all these songs again, it’s not in the future, it’s in the present. It sends a chill sometimes up my spine when we are rehearsing it because I realize when she was telling me about seas evaporating and things like that, I would say, ‘Our grandchildren will see that.’ But no, it’s happened now.
“She never hung up her beads from the ’60s like a lot of them did. And I think she is in a place now that when we listen to these words they won’t be prophecies anymore. What she wanted most from this ballet is to inspire people to act. It was to portray humanity at its most beautiful, its most creative, but also at its most destructive.”