They bombed paradise - Joni Mitchell Interview
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Joni Mitchell
very-warm — 19 years ago(February 15, 2007 12:39 PM)
The protest goes on: They bombed paradise (and I put up a multimedia extravaganza)
When Joni Mitchell was asked to take part in a ballet about her life, she was unimpressed. But then she saw the chance to make a statement about something more important: the war in Iraq.
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 09 February 2007, The Independent [UK]
Joni Mitchell: The Ballet does not sound too promising an artistic concept. In fact, when Joni Mitchell herself first heard about it she didn't like it at all.
The legendary singer-songwriter was approached by the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet in her native western Canada about putting scenes from her life on stage to a soundtrack of some of her most familiar songs, like "Both Sides Now" and "Chelsea Morning". It would, in effect, have been a kind of song-and-dance This Is Your Life to pay tribute to one of Canada's famously rare artistic luminaries.
"Please forgive my somewhat imperfect English," the Qubcois ballet director, Jean Grande-Maitre, wrote in a charming first letter introducing the idea. "I would really love to fly to Los Angeles and meet you personally for a very short moment." Mitchell was charmed enough to let him come and talk to her, and the two talked late into the night - a frequent habit of hers - about what he had in mind. "Everything centred around this blonde, blue-eyed ballerina from Australia, and it was sort of dancing my life," Mitchell later told the New York Times. "But I thought, that's not important right now." So Mitchell came up with another idea, centred on the twin preoccupations that have been 238gnawing at her, on and off, for the whole of her artistic career: the devastations being visited on the environment, and the horrors of war that the US has unleashed around the world, most recently in Iraq.
"Humbly I hope we can make a difference with this ballet," she told Grand-Maitre. "It's a red alert about the situation the world is in now. We're wasting our time on this fairy-tale war, when the real war is with God's creation. Nobody's fighting for God's creation." It's not entirely clear how humble Mitchell was - her one-time b68boyfriend David Crosby once said she was "about as humble as Mussolini" - but the upshot was that Grand-Maitre ditched five months of careful preparations for the 40th anniversary season of the Alberta Ballet and spent another four months reworking the concept from scratch.
And now the show, Dancing Joni: The Fiddle and the Drum, has just had its premiere in Calgary in a blizzard of publicity and anticipation. There are several reasons for the excitement, not the least of which is that Mitchell, at 64, still works at full tilt - perhaps harder than she ever has - and is clearly in no mood to be shelved as a Sixties relic whose best work is long behind her.
The show is a multimedia event, featuring not only Mitchell's music but also her rarely exhibited artwork. The artistic pieces, themselves multi-media works brooding on themes of war and destruction, determined the choice of songs in the show - many of them from her lesser known albums of the 1980s - and the songs, in turn, fed into the imagination of Grand-Maitre and his troupe of two dozen dancers.
Of the nine numbers in the show, two are entirely new recordings - her first in almost a decade. One, called "If I Had A Heart I'd Cry", is a lament for the ravages visited on the earth, set to a slow rumba beat. And the other is a reworking of Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If", which gets a jazz treatment including a piano performance by Herbie Hancock. (She did something similar to Yeats with her 1991 song "Slouching Toward Bethlehem".) As Mitchell told the Calgary Herald about her treatment of Kipling: "I changed the ending verse and I took out the archaic language." When she was asked if she thought Kipling would mind, she replied: "Oh no! I've made it better." The title song of the show, meanwhile, dates back to her second album, Clouds, from the late-1960s. She wrote "The Fiddle and the Drum" as a commentary on the war in Vietnam, seeing the fiddle as a symbol of peace and the drum as a metaphor for war. In the context of the ballet, it is also a starting point for a meditation on the nature of rhythm and the function it performs in different cultures. As Mitchell told The New York Times: "In Africa rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary. It's basically militant."
The ballet is only the jumping off point of what promises to be a big year for Mitchell. She plans to make the two new songs the centrepiece of an album, her first collection of original new work since 1998's Taming The Tiger. The title of the album will be either If or Strange Birds of Appetite, after one of the lines on "If I Had a Heart": "Holy Earth/ How can we heal you/We cover you like blight/Strange Birds of Appetite/If I had a heart/I'd cry." Her art5b4, meanwhile, is being showcased more publicly than ever. Mitchell fans kno