>>PREVIEW
DANCING JONI AND OTHER WORKS
Runs until February 10
Alberta Ballet
(Jubilee Auditorium)
While war and environmental neglect aren’t necessarily associated with a night at the ballet, Jean Grand-Maître decided to explore these themes when he shared his ideas about contemporary ballet with another artist.
The result is The Fiddle and Drum, a collaboration with Alberta Ballet’s artistic director (Grand-Maître) and internationally renowned musician and artist Joni Mitchell.
"At the beginning I called it Dancing Joni, in the early, early stages of the creation, when I was just beginning," explains Grand-Maître of the show’s title. "We needed to produce marketing material already, and for me this ballet was going to be more a biography of her life – there was going to be a woman and a ghostly child appear here and there throughout the music. And she didn’t want anything biographic, she said, ‘you know, there’s so much going on now, with the environment and the wars, I think we shouldn’t create escapist entertainment – we should really be engaged and synthesize people to what’s going on.’"
The result was a collaboration that would dig deeper than revealing one individual’s personal story, becoming a complex project exploring universal themes and struggles.
"She’s absolutely right," Grand-Maître says, noting that Mitchell herself is deeply concerned with the current state of the environment. "Half the trees on her property were just blown down in B.C., and polar bears are cannibalizing each other. I mean, it’s a red alert, and she’s one of those engaged artists who wants to bring the people to a theatre and ask questions and raise awareness. The Fiddle and Drum is a much more appropriate title than Dancing Joni, which gives the idea that we’re going to be dancing a lot of her fun music."
The unexpected marriage of ideas began with Grand-Maître searching for new material.
"In the ballet world we’re always looking to grow audiences. We’re looking for ways to interest an audience in our art form, while remaining relevant and challenging esthetics," he says. When it was suggested he should explore Mitchell’s work as a musician, he researched recordings, documentaries, films and her works as a visual artist.
"When I took a good listen to her music, I saw the potential sound for the ballet – there are long vocal chords and the grooves, the percussion and the pulse and the music is very danceable. Then studying her, you see that she’s a very accomplished painter and visual artist. I wanted to have more than just the rights to choreograph her music – I wanted her to participate and collaborate with us in our 40th anniversary season. The whole thing sounded like a dream at the beginning."
Grand-Maître wrote a letter to Mitchell, asking her to contemplate the idea of spiritual athletes that could give life to her poetic metaphors "in a world of sound, colour and texture that she would create around them." Creative sparks were ignited, and after meeting together in California, Grand-Maître brought Mitchell on board for the project. She would design the music, sound, set design and visual art for Alberta Ballet’s The Fiddle and Drum.
"The thing about her visual art is it influences a set of esthetics," Grand-Maître says, noting he always wanted her paintings to be part of the show. "When she showed me her latest art work – a new series of paintings that have come out, I think there are more than 80 of them – they’re very avant-garde, and a radical change from her earlier paintings. Before, they were more figurative and impressionistic in nature. These ones are of iconic images of the 20th century, and the beginning of the 21st — where television went negative."
Thinking of a negative television image, one might imagine film negatives before digital technology, where colours take to their opposite on the visual spectrum.
"The television was giving her images of society and events regarding environment and war, and she had them blown-up on huge canvases, through a special ink process. Then over these canvases, there’s three paintings per canvas –she painted over them in colours of jade green, champagne yellow, electric blues and some greys and black," he explains. "And she transformed these images of events like Tiananmen Square, the Iraq war and environmental disasters into iconic images that are filtered through these layers of colour. They are quite extraordinary."
Both Grand-Maître and Mitchell agreed the images went well with her music. The result is a video installation that is part of The Fiddle and Drum. Mitchell gave over 100 hours to this installation of her visual works.
Another aspect influenced by Mitchell’s visual work is the dancers’ costumes as well as the theme of the choreography.
"I said to Joni, the best thing about ballet dancers is their incredible physiques, as athletic people. And I didn’t want to costume them in the ’60s through the ’90s, so I said we should leave them like abstract energy that responds to your music, the modulation in your tonalities and the sensitivities in your lyrics," Grand-Maître says. "I wanted the dancers to be basically body-painted in colours of jade green as though they came out of the paintings themselves."
Grand-Maître’s choreography keeps true to an abstract and less-literal interpretation of Mitchell’s lyrics.
"A lot of the lyrics are so rich, there’s so much information that a lot of the visuals will be complementing the lyrics," Grand-Maître says. "I said I would prefer to choreograph what I call a kinetic Greek chorus where the dancers are like the symphony, so her voice is the string section. There are incredible grooves in the musical accompaniment, percussions, woodwinds and brass – the other parts of the orchestra. I studied the lyrics sensitively of course, but I really approached them so the dancers are expressing the moods of the songs." |
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