BALLET TELLS A PRAIRIE TALE
Alberta Ballet’s collaboration with k.d. lang mythologizes Western Canadian landscape
Mythic tales are not usually set on the Prairies.
After all — take it from someone who grew up on them — what’s a prairie but an absence of anything interesting to rest your eyes upon?
And who among the millions of Canadians who have endured the drive across the Trans-Canada Highway between Calgary and Winnipeg has not fought a losing battle against remaining conscious over the course of a thousand of the flattest, emptiest, most endless kilometres known to man, woman or country singer?
Thanks to the collaboration between the Alberta Ballet and k.d. lang, you may never drive that stretch of highway and think the same about those empty prairies again.
Welcome to Balletlujah, the Alberta Ballet’s latest interdisciplinary foray — there’s pop, jazz, country, blues, and even a classical ballet interpretation of a square dance — into the songs of k.d. lang.
From pas de deux to Big Boned Gal (from southern Alberta), in one felt swoop? Believe it. That’s because in mining the emotional core of Lang’s astonishingly diverse songbook for motifs and connecting threads, the thing the ballet’s artistic director — and the show’s choreographer — Jean Grand-Maitre kept coming back to was the prairies of Lang’s youth, growing up in Consort, Alberta.
“I said, what’s your life been like?” Grand-Maitre says.
“And she said to me, for me, it’s a series of unrelated events — I feel like a transient yogi walking through life and experiencing moments that are not necessarily tied to each other.”
Now of course, if there’s a transient yogi searching for earthly wisdom, there’s got to be a mountaintop to look out from, scanning the horizon for the meaning of life, right?
Not if you grew up in Consort — a town of around 700 in eastern Alberta, equidistant from Edmonton, Calgary and Saskatoon — it doesn’t.
“I said, was growing up on the Prairies like that?” Montreal native GrandMaitre says, and the way he says Prairies, he could be saying Asgard, or Sri Lanka, or Middle Earth.
“She said yes,” he says. “She had so much time for daydreaming, and everybody in the neighbourhood (of Consort) was eccentric — her math teacher drove to work on a tractor.
Early in the process, he gave his costume designer a book by Alberta painter Maxwell Bates, who famously captured the lives of look of mid-century prairie dwellers in an expressionistic way. Seguin-Poirier says she gave a copy to k.d. lang, who loved the work.
“His art inspired the drawings for the costumes and how we were going to represent prairie people with dignity,” Grand-Maitre said.
That led to Seguin-Poirier devising a series of innovative costumes. The big question, she said, was figuring out how to reflect the Prairies in the costumes.
“That’s (the point) where Jean and I speak a lot ... (You) do a lot of research, and you come up with the wheat on the lower half, and over the waist, it’s sky blue.”
But for a costume designer, the design aspect is only one part of the answer.
“Then, you have to find out if you can print that on fabric — technology has changed so that you can print almost anything now — but we still have to find out if we can print it, and it has to be on synthetic material.
“And,” she adds, “a dancer must be able to move in it.”
Another challenge Grand-Maitre presented Seguin-Poirier came from his efforts to symbolize Lang’s spiritual side.
“I wanted there to be an animal in the ballet,” he says, “because it’s the Prairies and I always imagined people who grow up in the middle of nowhere like that to have a more profound relationship with nature and animals.”
What Grand-Maitre wasn’t counting on was lang, a practising Buddhist, choosing the crow.
“In my mythology, that I know, the crow was (meant to symbolize) death,” Grand-Maitre says. “Vincent Van Gogh painted crows flying towards him on his last painting before he committed suicide, and so the crow for me was death — but apparently, in Buddhism, the crow is your protector.”
So Grand-Maitre introduced a character (who appears mostly in projected video images), before appearing at the end of the ballet.
Then it was up to Seguin-Poirier to create a crow costume that dancers could move in. The cost of feathers was too onerous, so she got creative. She tracked down synthetic feathers made of organza, and after some experimentation, made it work.