k.d. lang’s music inspires Balletlujah!
Alberta Ballet’s Balletlujah! inspired by the songs of k.d. lang
When thoughts turn to myths, they don’t often look like the prairies. After all, what’s a prairie but an absence of anything interesting to rest your eyes upon?
And who among us who has endured the Trans-Canada Highway between Alberta and Winnipeg has not fought a losing battle against remaining conscious over the flattest, yellowest, most endless kilometres known to man, woman or country singer?
Thanks to Balletlujah!, a collaboration between Alberta Ballet’s Jean Grand-Maître and k.d. lang, you may never drive that highway and think the same way about the prairies again. The Alberta Ballet production has its world première in Edmonton on Friday.
In mining the emotional core of lang’s astonishingly diverse songbook for motifs and connecting threads, the thing Grand-Maître kept coming back to was the prairies of her youth, growing up in Consort in eastern Alberta.
“I said, ‘what’s your life been like?’ ” Grand-Maître 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.
“I said, ‘was growing up on the prairies like that?’ ” says Grand-Maître, a Montreal native. “She said yes, 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.
“It’s a bit like the whole thing was a dream and she said ‘yeah, almost like a fairy tale.’ ”
A fairy tale where girl meets girl and goes off to conquer the world, or at least tour it, becoming a Juno- and GrammyAward-winning superstar with a voice as big and beautiful as those sprawling prairies.
“We decided,” says GrandMaître, “(that) we would create a mythical prairie where some of it is real, just wind blowing and just simple, simple guitar, and then sometimes, it becomes a surrealistic dream and (then) she falls in love.”
To recreate that mythic prairie, Grand-Maître enlisted the support of a number of designers, including costume designer Ann Seguin-Poirier, videographer Adam Larsen, set designer Guillaume Lord, sound designer Claude Lemelin and light designer Pierre Lavoie.
Balletlujah! follows a trio of pop ballets over the past half decade in which GrandMaître has worked with the songs of Joni Mitchell, Elton John and Sarah McLachlan, in the process reconfiguring the boundaries of what a ballet could be.
What all of those pop ballets aren’t, he is quick to emphasize, are biographies of the artists.
“Sometimes people confuse the two — it’s not a biography of the artist, but rather of her art. It’s a portrait of their music and their art, not their life — that’s not as interesting for dance.”
What Grand-Maître has focused on, instead, are the songs that range from lang’s earliest days in Edmonton as a cowpunk icon (Big Boned Gal) to her Sinatra-infused crooner period (Constant Craving), to her Cohen-inspired, Olympicsized spiritual side (Hallelujah), all of it told through the lens of a love affair with another woman.
“Listening to all her songs, I realized, more than half are about love. I said (to myself), ‘there’s going to have to be a love story in this ballet.’ It’s all about love and it’s going to have to be between two women because it’s k.d. lang.”
Which is all fine and good, but a ballet is a visceral, kinetic affair. In other words, you need to find ballerinas who can lift other ballerinas.
In Alberta Ballet’s case, part of the task falls to Tara Williamson and Cuban Hayna Gutierrez, who bring lang and her lover to life in dance.
“Usually we’re much softer in our upper body and port de bras,” says Williamson, who has played Juliet and Carmen, among other characters. “All of a sudden, we’re lifting one another so we have to engage our stomach muscles more to prevent injury to the lower back from lifting.”
“I was in so much pain!” Gutierrez says. “Because for example, I have a pas de deux with Tara. She’s a lover, so I have to partner her and she has to partner me.
“We’re not accustomed to partner a woman. We’re accustomed to a guy partnering us, so it’s very hard for us at the beginning.
“I had to ask my fiancé (a male dancer in the company),” she adds. “‘How do you do this? Because I have to lift her sometimes!’ ”
However, while the demands on both of them are considerable, both ballerinas welcomed the chance to tackle new choreography and face uncommon challenges.
For Williamson, who has been with the company for six years, Balletlujah! is comfortable because of the shorthand she’s developed with Grand-Maître over the years.
“We have a good relationship,” she says. “I can give my feedback a little more, my interpretation about what he’s trying to create.”
Thanks to his quartet of pop ballets, Grand-Maître has grown the audience of a small, classical ballet company on the Canadian Prairies, drawing attention to it from around the dance world.
Maybe the only ones who look out at Prairies and see nothing are Canadians who grew up believing all the fun was happening in New York, Hollywood and Miami Beach. Until Grand-Maître and lang hooked up, unless you loved the stories of W.O. Mitchell, no one had thought to mythologize the Prairies in this way.
“I’d say to k.d. ‘what’s a perfect afternoon?’ ” Grand-Maître says. “And she’d say, ‘early autumn, in the middle of a field, lying in the grass with my girlfriend, looking up at the sky.’ ”