Customer Reviews

Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle And The Drum

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...but it's a beautiful work of art. I don't know much about dance or ballet but by the last couple of songs, I was moved to tears--joyful tears, actually. The dancers' performances brought something new to the songs and the messages they contain as a collection. I think people who are visually-oriented will enjoy it in a different way than a longtime Joni fan. Either way, it's simple, stunning, and moving.

Every moment of this awesome performance and the DVD extras is quite simply stunning. Joni's songs here get new life of interpretation, esp. some of her (less well known children :-) more recent gestalt meaning layers such as in The Beat of Black Wings and Passion Play(When All The Slaves Are Free). Her understanding how the earth and religion interact is a completely strong line in her work that is more clear in this performance. The newer songs at the end of the performance (If I had a Heart, If and the excellent new Big Yellow Taxi) provide great lift and renewal. Plus the cyclops video DVD extra (Joni's music and her recent art work only) is compelling. Seeing that Joni herself was so intimate with forming the dancers interpretations and synchronizing the art only adds to the wonder of this collection. Get this now and be aware .... you may soon find yourself on the road to see this timely performance live. Joni's themes are where we are going now.

Joni's collaboration with the Alberta Ballet was incredible. I have waited almost two years to see this ballet and am extatic about it finally coming to DVD. It was intense, thrilling, and beautifully done. If I ever have the opportunity to see it live, I will definately be there.

It's nice to see artists from the sixties still creating art that is still hip by today's standards. Put it on and space-out. Watch it or listen to it....either way it's entertaining.

I have been curious about this production ever since I purchased Joni's wonderful CD "Shine" in Fall of 2007. I've read a lot about it since then, but I was pretty much resigned to the fact that I would never be afforded the opportunity to see it. When I saw that it was available on DVD, I was thrilled!

Having just watched it for the first (and second) time, I am happy to report that it was $20 very well spent. It hits on all cylinders. The song selection includes some of Joni's very best, the choreography is inspired, the dancers exude passion and athleticism... but most of all passion, the lighting is spot on, and the director of photography captured the performance in a way that gave me goose-bumps.

I'm a huge fan of Joni's, but I think anyone with any modicum of appreciation for the arts will come away from this experience with an admiration for the talent that has gone into, and the amazing results that come out of, this.

Hard pressed to choose a favorite number, but "The Three Great Stimulants" has to be one of the best (finally... a track from "Dog Eat Dog" stands out!), along with "Passion Play" and "The Beat of Black Wings"... both amazing songs and interpreted wonderfully. "If" is just joyous... as though the after-party and reward for a night of hard work by the dancers as well as a message that it does not have to be gloom and doom and it is not to late for us to make a difference, change our ways and save our planet.

The encore of "Big Yellow Taxi" (while not my favorite song) is a great bonus and a great finish to the DVD. It was all over way too quickly, but this is a singularly superb performance by everyone involved. My hat is off (well, actually, I hate wearing hats, so it's always off, but you know what I mean) to Joni and Jean for their amazing collaboration, and to the wonderful dancers who brought their concept to life.

Buy this, enjoy it, and share it with your friends!

The choreography is very dull, anxiety is obvious in some dancers, and the overall result is not good at all. The only good thing that I found in this DVD is Joni's music. Her music is simply too beautiful.

Awesome and worth buying! Wanted to go to the live performance but couldn't make it so I bought the DVD instead! I am so glad I did! Beautiful production with Joni Mitchell's voice.... is a true winner!

Joni Mitchell came to prominence with the 1968 release of her first, self-named album for Reprise Records. This seminal year also saw such artists as the Who, the Byrds, the Beatles, the Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Crosby, Stills and Nash as major influences in pop music. Canadian-born singer-songwriter Mitchell, whose style embraced both folk and lyrical pop, brought a new, fresh sound to contemporary music. Her best-known song, "Both Sides Now," became a hit for Judy Collins in the 1960's.
"Joni Mitchell's The Fiddle and the Drum" is a collaboration between Mitchell and Alberta Ballet Artistic Director Jean Grand-Maitre. In 2007, the two created an emotional production blending Mitchell's music and art with Grand-Maitre's choreography. The result was a narrative ballet that explores the human spirit's potential to create and destroy, its ability to love and hate, as well as its capacity for war and peace. The set for the ballet features Mitchell's art work projected onto a large canvas screen.
The work reflects Mitchell's lifelong concerns about environmental neglect and the tendency of mankind to go to war. The soundtrack includes re-mastered versions of ten songs from Mitchell's catalog, including three from her most recent album, "Shine" -- "If," "If I Had a Heart," and a remix of "Big Yellow Taxi." It also contains "For the Roses," "Passion Play (When All the Slaves Are Free)," "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "The Beat of Black Wings," "Sex Kills," "Three Giant Stimulants," and "The Fiddle and the Drum."
The DVD release includes an interview in which Mitchell and Grand-Maitre share the personal story of their collaboration, a featurette of two ballet dancers describing their experiences with the project, and an eight-page photo-rich booklet with liner notes written by Mitchell.

This is a haunting piece. I have had it in my head for weeks now! Amazing choreography and dancing, and wonderful music. It seems to shift to more upbeat choreography towards the end, culminating in an oddly perky encore, but still wonderful. My one complaint, it is over edited! There are flashes of the video projections that tear away from the choreography, and the occasional slow motion stuff drove me nuts... but still an amazing treat to have this in your collection.

This ballet, sometimes called a play by Joni Mitchell herself, seems designed to highlight and focus on Joni Mitchell's less-well-known songs in order to make them more well known and perhaps even popular, but this ballet seems as well designed to try to convey a series of political or propagandistic messages, such as war is bad, peace is good, earth is blue but green is better, capitalism is bad, America is bad, and maybe world communism based on inconvenient global warming lies is good if not better, so long as everybody is forced to live in (green)peace and under a five-pointed star. It's not clear that Joni Mitchell explicitly advocates the One World Order with the new Green Religion (with its carbon tax tithings), but the ballet's "green shirts" dancers marching in the background, the changing one-eyed cyclops (sometimes shaped like the Eye in the Sky or the Moon or the Sun Goddess bearing Joni Mitchell's face) watching like Big Brother over the ballet dancers, the celebration of poems by W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling ("Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "If," respectively), both of whom were high-order Masons, give more than a hint that something collectivistic is being presented here. The only time liberty is even vaguely mentioned in any of the lyrics is in reference to "free choice" being behind us.

So, here's the best way to try to view the ballet: try not to think too much about it. Don't really strain to listen to the lyrics. Keep your eyes on the beautiful, rhythmical dancing bodies and listen to the beat of the music. You will enjoy yourself then.

The male dancers display buns of brass while the women sport glutes of glass, beautifully. The men dance in tight underwear with chests as chiseled as a turtle's tummy. The women dance in light one-piece bodysuits mostly or whispy negligees, girl-breasted and long-legged. The movements are fluid and, with one or two exceptions, most of the movements are traditional ballet movements. There is no innovative dancing as might be seen in a Twyla Tharpe troupe. One exception to the traditional ballet dance form happens quixotically with a few hip-hop movements in the stoical "If" song based on Rudyard Kipling (and in "Big Yellow Taxi" at the very end, a kind of encore piece, not meant to be part of the original ballet or play). The other exception is most noteworthy. It happens - twice - for the song "The Beat of Black Wings" where, appropriately, the message is about the evils of war and the three male dancers do a boot-camp-styled imitation of soldiers sliding their bellies across muddy trenches, which was very moving, stirring.

While most of the lyrics and the deliberate symbolism strain to convey a political message of Canadian Green Collectivism, the whole does not cohere; the thing falls apart, and one wonders a bit if there is a center -- whether it be Joni's lyrics, the political message or both. In the direct middle of the "play," Joni sings "For the Roses," which is really about her former relationship to James Taylor. Nothing in the entire ballet is so intimate and personal as this -- and one wonders just what it is doing in this piece so loaded down with "messages" and propaganda.

In the end, the audience gets to see a number of times all the ballet dancers wearing green shirts, collecting together in the center of the stage like one green hydra on the stage, a cellular growth of something new, perhaps -- or perhaps something cancerous like World Communism.

I do think Joni Mitchell has fallen for the pseudo-scientific myths about global warming, which makes her less a poet than another member of the Confused, and for me those German helmets worn several times by the dancers, the references as well to World War II and the Masons in this ballet all demonstrate a phony elitism that isn't as bright as her one early statement that we are "star dust," the core idea that remains timeless (but which plays no role at all in this ballet). This ballet and most of the songs in it are ready for the compost or recycle bin I'm not proud to say. In one song, Joni tells us there are "too many people" on the planet and there's "too little land." Here she subscribes to eugenicist policies like any good little Elitist.

I won't even mention the little girl that is forced to appear four or five times throughout the ballet -- for sentimental, mawkish reasons.

Don't hate my review because you don't like that I disagree with the ballet's messages political. I either describe the ballet accurately or I don't. The truth isn't political. It's only forced to be, like any "inconvenient spoof," as Canadian Matrix-cutter, Alan Watt, has said.