Hanging with Joni Mitchell

Working Three Shifts, and Outrage Overtime – by DAVID YAFFE/NY Times

JONI MITCHELL , despite her introspective reputation, has always been a dancer. At a disco during the ’80s she encountered a music critic spouting invective. But after watching her dance, he asked for a lesson. “I told him to close his eyes and center his weight on his body with his feet astride,” she recalled. “And I said: ‘Relax your body. Keep your eyes closed. Feel the beat. Express how much you enjoy that beat with your body and forget what you look like.’ ”

Two decades later this legendary singer-songwriter is still giving dance lessons: “The Fiddle and the Drum,” her choreographic collaboration with the Alberta Ballet, opens on Feb. 8 in Calgary. Meanwhile “Flag Dance,” an installation of her antiwar mixed-media art, has finished a two-month run at the Lev Moross Gallery in West Hollywood, and she has recently recorded enough new songs for an album, which she plans to call either “Strange Birds of Appetite” or “If.”

“I’m working three shifts,” Ms. Mitchell, 63, said. “I’m doing the work of four 20-year-olds. Between the art show and the ballet and the new album, I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”

She was seated at an outdoor table at La Scala Presto, a modest Brentwood trattoria. Los Angeles was hitting a slight cold snap, but under the heated lamp Ms. Mitchell could smoke in relative comfort, perched in front of a suburban parking lot, where they had doubtlessly paved paradise. We were having an early dinner, which for her is more like breakfast. She started with two cappuccinos and lemonade, warning me, “I’m a night owl. I’ll outlast you.”

Ms. Mitchell speaks as she sings, lilting up and down in bars of her native Saskatchewanean vocalise. But she insists on depth, on full attention and on sincerity, her “jive detector” on constant high alert. “I don’t like being too looked up at or too looked down on,” she said. “I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshiped or spat out.”

Over the course of a dozen or so hours of a wide-ranging conversation, she gets to talking about how her new interdisciplinary project began: with a curious letter she received last year from one Jean Grande-Maître.

“Please forgive my somewhat imperfect English as I am a native of Quebec and I am still brushing up on this new language,” it read. “Next year will be Alberta Ballet’s 40th Anniversary Season and as Artistic Director, I would be enthused by the possibility of choreographing a ballet to your brilliant and profoundly moving music.

“I would really love to fly to Los Angeles,” it went on, “and meet you personally for a very short moment .”

They got together at a Beverly Hills restaurant (with an outdoor terrace where she could smoke of course), and Mr. Grand-Maître presented his idea: a kind of jukebox ballet called Dancing Joni, leaning on audience favorites like “Both Sides Now” and “Chelsea Morning.”

“Everything centered around this blonde, blue-eyed ballerina from Australia, and it was sort of dancing my life,” Ms. Mitchell recalled. “But I thought, that’s not important right now.” Anyway, she had a better idea.

Mr. Grand-Maître couldn’t have known it, but after a hiatus of 10 years she had recently begun writing new songs. She was spurred on by something her grandson had said while listening to family fighting: “Bad dreams are good — in the great plan.”

Ms. Mitchell was stunned. “How did he know that?” she wondered. “That’s an amazing thing for anyone to know at any age. The line just stuck.” When the war in Iraq began, her grandson’s words resonated in her mind, and she “gave birth,” as she described it, to four new pieces.

Mr. Grand-Maître’s invitation seemed like an opportunity to present that music in a new context. “Humbly I hope we can make a difference with this ballet,” she told him, speaking of her outrage about the foreign and environmental policies of the United States. “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.”

That “short moment” he had requested turned into one of her inimitable all-nighters. And in the end the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet got more than he hoped for. Not only did Ms. Mitchell agree to the project, she took it over.

For the last several weeks she had been sleeping by day and recording songs for her new album from dusk till dawn. If she had a spare moment, she scribbled notes about the ballet set. Music, art, dance: Ms. Mitchell calls it “crop rotation.”

She is of course well past the stage of having to prove herself artistically. She is in possession of one of the most extraordinary song catalogs of the past half-century. Her chords break harmonic rules, have no technical names and defy Western musical theory. Her voice is an instrument that has grown sublimely heavier and huskier over the decades.

But she could not help being what she calls a “pot-stirrer.” She thought about how the Maya calendar ends in 2012, about the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. What, she wondered, what do you write at the end of the world?

“I haven’t written in 10 years, and what’s coming out of me is all sociological and theological complaint,” she said while staring at the lighted end of an American Spirit cigarette. She sees herself as a proud heretic: “At first I thought I was going over new territory, but then I realized that many of the people who went over this territory were killed.”

“The Fiddle and the Drum” features two of her new songs: “If,” based on the Rudyard Kipling poem about war and stoicism (“Just about my favorite poem,” she says), and “If I Had a Heart, I’d Cry,” criticizing what she calls the current “holy war.” The rest of the ballet, named for a 1970 antiwar ballad from her second album, “Clouds,” is dominated by material from her ’80s and ’90s albums, which are more rhythmically charged (and hence better for dance) than her earlier work.

The backdrop is composed of stills from Ms. Mitchell’s mixed-media art exhibition. One night while she was flipping through “The Gold Diggers of 1937,” CNN and the History Channel on her ancient television (she is something of a Luddite and only recently got a decent stereo system), her screen went on the fritz, blurring images and turning everything a radioactive emerald. Faces melted away, and lines of bodies seeped into the frightening indistinctness of nightmare, as though the malfunctioning television were offering a metaphorical political commentary. She could no longer tell soldier from chorus girl, battle casualty from lover, the dancer from the dance.

In “The Fiddle and the Drum” members of the muscular young dance troupe mimics these images, marching down the stage like soldiers, their bodies almost naked and painted jade green, looking as if they had emerged from the artwork projected above them. They are both graceful and military, tinged with the color of new life and nuclear holocaust, and move to what Ms. Mitchell called “the beats of war.”

With 9 songs and 27 dancers, the result is equal parts Busby Berkeley spectacle, political jeremiad and rock opera, a collection of songs that form an essay on war and incipient environmental apocalypse. Young, athletic bodies are sent off to kill and die. The earth is electronically set for destruction. Dire biblical prophecies and the grave warnings of Indian chiefs ring true.

But Mr. Grand-Maître wanted to avoid the literalism that marred Twyla Tharp ’s recent Bob Dylan musical, choreographed as it was with jugglers and clowns who came down to do tricks for you. (“Dylan’s not a dancer,” Ms. Mitchell added. “I am.”) So when she sings the line “In some office sits a poet,” the choreographer was quick to say, we will not actually see a poet sitting in an office. The approach is more abstract — allegorical but not obvious.

“We’re going to open the curtain” Mr. Grand-Maître explained, “and people who are expecting a ballet will get something more like a rock concert.”

During “If” Kipling’s verse is staged as a street scene, a place where young people prefer dancing to warring, and where hip-hop, modern dance, ballet and jazz collide. Mr. Grand-Maître compares it to a Mardi Gras carnival. “Hold on,” Ms. Mitchell sings in the song’s refrain, but the dancers are going wild.

Mr. Grand-Maître said, “What she’s saying in the song is to hold on to that life and that flow.” He and Ms. Mitchell met twice in Los Angeles and talked on the phone a dozen times. But while she will be on hand for the last week of rehearsals (and will film them for a documentary she’s making), she was not directly involved in the dance itself.

“I never really explained to her what I was choreographing physically, but rather how I was staging it,” Mr. Grand-Maître recalled. “Like when Mary Magdalene appeared on a screen during ‘Sex Kills’ or when Killer Kyle in ‘Beat of Black Wings’ transforms from innocence to aggressive behavior. I told her I wanted to create that in a dance performance. She loved that.”

Referring to the ballet’s title song Ms. Mitchell explained: “I was using the fiddle to symbolize peace and the drum to symbolize militancy. Those Édith Piaf and Noël Coward songs were all marches. That was the groove of the World War II era. White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn’t have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It’s basically militant.”

All in all it’s a far cry from the project Mr. Grand-Maître envisioned when he wrote that first timid letter to Ms. Mitchell. “It’s a hell of a lot better than what I had, and I feel very invigorated by these ideas.”

Once you get past the security gates, Ms. Mitchell’s house feels like a pocket of middle-class comfort in the midst of zillionaire Beverly Hills. In some ways life is still as it was in 1974, when she bought the house: She has no computer, no voice mail, no cellphone and no e-mail. At one point, when we tried to remember one of her lyrics, we scrolled through my iPod. She said it was the first time she had listened to one.

As she played some tracks from her new album, she was still adding and subtracting, wincing at lines that struck her as too sentimental.

“Listen to this song,” she insisted at one point. But she wouldn’t really let me, or I couldn’t sufficiently take it in. Her conversation competed with her music, and I was getting double Joni.

Talking about the ballet turned into a kind of circle game. The dance was about the war, and the war led her to write, which in turn meant talking about what makes her write in the first place. There was simply too much to express.

“You’ve only got so much space, and that’s the point,” she said. “That’s the art. In a very short space, you need pertinent details while knowing what to leave out.” One song she’s still revising is called “Shine.”

“It starts, ‘Shine on Vegas and Wall Street/Place your bets,’ ” she said. “You could write a thousand verses. ‘Shine on the dazzling darkness that mends us when we sleep/Shine on what we throw away and what we keep.’ I have written about 60 different verses and rhyming couplets to this thing, and I’ve kept 12. Are they the best ones? I don’t know. I could write 60 a week. What are the 12 most important things to illuminate? It’s overwhelming.”

She continued into the wee hours of the night, musing about her relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1964 but with whom she was happily reunited 10 years ago, and about the shift from personal writing to her broader ecological-political-theological ruminations. On “If I Had a Heart, I’d Cry,” one of the songs she used in the ballet, she sings, “Holy earth/How can we heal you/We cover you like blight/Strange Birds of Appetite/If I had a heart/I’d cry.” I asked her to replay me the song a few times. It is one of the most haunting melodies she has ever written.

“During that song,” she explained, “there are seven night photographs of the earth from every angle, and when you see it, it’s frightening to witness what an electronic blight we are at night.”

There was an electronic blight as she drove me back to my hotel at 5 a.m. in her Lexus, with her Jack Russell terrier, Coco, perched on her lap. The block had lost its electricity, as if on cue after a night of dire ecological warnings.

“My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species,” she said. “I can’t cry about it. In a way I’m inoculated. I’ve suffered this pain for so long. We were expelled from Eden. What keeps us out of Eden?” She thought about this for a moment before riffing on a Dylan line: “I tried to tell everybody, but I could not get it across.”

“Well, I’m being more specific now,” she allowed. “The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species. That’s what I meant when I said that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

[David Yaffe is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of “Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing” (Princeton).]