K.d. lang gives voice to Balletlujah
Film recreates scenes from ballet that explores experiences from performers’ life
“I love the narrative, how it starts in the small town and goes to L.A. and then back to the open Prairies. K.D. LANG SINGER, SONGWRITER
Near the halfway mark of the CBC documentary Balletlujah, there is a sequence involving the Neil Young song Helpless.
It’s a dramatic scene without dialogue depicting two lovers arguing in a pickup truck set against the golden sun-soaked backdrop of the Alberta Prairies. It’s interspersed with rehearsal shots of a Calgary ballet and backed with k.d. lang’s yearning version of Young’s classic ballad.
It’s a scene that perfectly showcases all the dizzying layers to the hour-long film, which is almost a tribute to the act of interpretation itself.
The scene is part of director Grant Harvey’s cinematic take on the Alberta Ballet production of the same name, which was the ballet company’s take on lang’s music. That specific song is lang’s reverent take on the music of Neil Young.
“There’s so many interpretations,” says lang, on the phone from her home in Portland, Ore.
“My interpretations of Helpless and Hallelujah may differ from the songwriter. It was just very interesting to watch the creative process on many levels. Even (Harvey’s) interpretation of dance is different than probably someone who really understands dance or films dance a lot.
“I think (Harvey’s) interpretation was very emotional and erotic, in a way. It’s really neat to be involved in so many people creating a piece of work.”
Airing Thursday on CBC, the hour-long film certainly seems like a strange hybrid. Harvey, a former Calgarian who mostly works in dramatic episodic television, mixes the gorgeously shot narrative with cinema verité- style backstage footage of the original 2013 dance production and talking-head interviews with lang, Alberta Ballet’s Jean Grand-Maitre and principal dancers Skye Balfour-Ducharme and Nicole Caron.
A handful of lang’s songs — everything from favourites such as Constant Craving and Hallelujah to obscure choices like Acquiesce and Sugar Buzz — tell the same simple story: Smalltown Alberta girl meets smalltown Alberta girl, heads to the big city, loses girl and returns home to find true love.
But taken from the confines of the stage, the story opens up as a widescreen homage to Alberta’s film-friendly vistas.
“I love the narrative, how it starts in the small town and goes to L.A. and then back to the open Prairies,” lang says.
“It has such a beautiful flow. And I think (Harvey) really framed it, pardon the pun, just spectacularly. It’s contemporary and modern, but he’s also an Alberta boy and really wanted to showcase the landscapes. I just think it’s all around a very interesting collaboration.”
Harvey, who now lives in Toronto, put together a pitch for the CBC with producers from Calgary’s Corkscrew Media three years ago at the Banff World Media Festival. The cameras were rolling during dress rehearsals of Balletlujah in Calgary before the 2013 launch.
As a documentary, Balletlujah captures behind-the-scenes moments, plus the conversations, and growing friendship, between lang and Grand-Maitre. The singer-songwriter also becomes interviewer at one point, asking dancers Balfour-Ducharme and Caron about their interpretations of specific songs and even their level of comfort when it came to portraying the same-sex love story.
While the filmed-on-location dance numbers use the same choreography and music as the ballet, the Longview, Calgary and Los Angeles backdrops bring another dimension.
Set to the mournful strains of lang’s Haint It Funny, Caron’s anguished solo performance in a rain-soaked Calgary alley — portraying a rain-soaked L.A. alley — is breathtaking, while the widescreen stomp of Big Boned Gal, set in a rural roadhouse, has the playful feel of an old-school musical.
“When we got the green light from the CBC, I watched a few dance films and ... unless you understood dance, seeing dance performed in a theatre on film didn’t really capture how awesome it was,” Harvey says.
“Ultimately, I wanted my mom and dad to like it. I wanted my brother to like it. I wanted them to get excited about ballet like I did when I started going to the rehearsals. So my thought was (to take) the ballet and bring my skills as a dramatic filmmaker.
“Because it was a narrative that was similar to k.d. lang’s life, I thought, what if we took the actual story and played it like a movie, shot like a movie, in real locations like a movie?
“That was the inspiration,” Harvey says. “I really like the idea of those dancers performing not just on the stage, in two dimensions, but in three dimensions and shot like you would do a scene from a movie.”
In the film, lang is quick to point out that Balletlujah’s storyline is not really autobiographical. But it does touch on formative periods in her life, including her younger years in the small Alberta town of Consort and her move to Los Angeles later in life, where she discovered Buddhism and “grew up a lot.”
She said she was surprised at how well the seemingly unconnected songs worked together to create a new narrative.
“I love that (Grand-Maitre) created a story based on my catalogue,” lang says.
“He created this narrative thread based on music, which wasn’t even sequential. It was all over the place. It was this portrait of this love affair using my music.
“It was really humbling and made me very proud — first of all that he put so much effort into it and listened so deeply — but that it was so eclectic and (showed) the wide spectrum of the songs.”