The Fiddle and the Drum, her one-act collaboration with Alberta Ballet, has grown into a full production.

JONI MITCHELL'S THE FIDDLE AND THE DRUM
Company: Alberta Ballet
When: Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Jubilee Auditorium
Tickets: $30 to $90 available through Ticketmaster, 780-451-8000 or www.ticketmaster.ca

Alberta Ballet choreographer Jean Grand-Maitre loved Joni Mitchell's one-act ballet The Fiddle and the Drum when it first hit the stage two years ago -- but there was one problem.

"Once we completed the short version and the reaction was so positive -- not just in Alberta or in Canada, but internationally -- I said to her (Mitchell), 'It goes by in the bat of an eyelash.' It could easily withstand four more songs or 20 more minutes of choreography. And we could put an intermission in somewhere in the middle to give the dancers a break, because it's so physically demanding."

The legendary singer-songwriter was game. As Grand-Maitre puts it, "there's a lot more that she wanted to say."

The two artistic allies set out to enhance their ballet by adding more content, more thoughts and more choreography. Grand-Maitre says an enormous part of developing the full-length production was selecting the songs and themes.

"Originally when we started selecting songs for the ballet, we had a 42-song list, a five-hour, Ben-Hur ballet," he says, laughing. "Joni calls it a play. For her, there's a strong narrative and a psychological narrative going on through the ballet, which is for her very structured, so it wasn't just about making selections, but how songs would be sequenced. The work now has more density. We can really delve deeper into things because we have more time to tell our story."

Their story is a semi-abstract ballet that explores themes of war, violence and environmental destruction, performed to Mitchell's music, with her artwork projected on large canvas screens. Not the typical subject matter covered by your regular ballet, but neither Grand-Maitre nor Mitchell are known for art that panders to the status quo.

"Art can serve as a vaccine, where you inoculate the audience with some good and some bad. People would like the arts to be entertaining and fun, put your ostrich head in the ground, but you have to tackle the difficult themes of life and the issues," Grand-Maitre says.

"Certainly Joni's art -- her paintings, her writing, her music -- it's always been about human decency, whether it's dealing with other humans, other nations or the environment.

"Some of her songs are based on poems by Yeats and Kipling; one other song is inspired by the writings of Nietzsche -- how the western world is only playing with half a deck in our philosophical approach to life."

While both artists were passionate about stirring up thought and provoking discussion among audience members, they were also aiming to offer a great night out, looking to the films of Hollywood director Busby Berkeley for inspiration.

"They tackled difficult themes during the Depression, but they still gave you wild and wonderful entertainment," Grand-Maitre says.

"So as you're looking at these difficult subjects and questioning some of our human behaviour, at the same time it's filled with human beauty. You're contrasting our capacity to create beauty with our capacity to create destruction. Almost all the comments I get from spectators is that this ballet is full of hope and optimism."

The extended version premiered in Medicine Hat (near Mitchell's birthplace, Fort McLeod) in January and has since toured across the Prairies to Regina, Saskatoon and Lloydminster before making its way back to Edmonton and Calgary, the ballet company's home cities.

Many things have changed for audiences since the shorter version premiered in 2007. Barack Obama is in the White House. The world is in the thick of a recession. But things are also still the same. Canada still has troops in Afghanistan. Climate change is ever-pressing.

"The ballet has taken on a different meaning, in a way," Grand-Maitre says. "Instead of being a ballet criticizing an administration, it's a ballet that's almost sporting the philosophy of a new administration. We are seeing it with Harper as well -- he's suddenly funding the arts.

"It's like when they were singing about Vietnam at Woodstock. At the time they were protesting, and when you listen to Woodstock today, it's prophetic. Our ballet went from protest to prophetic," Grand-Maitre says.