From The Independent in Britain:
The Protest Goes on: They Bombed Paradise (and I Put up a Multimedia Extravaganza)See also here.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
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. …
So Mitchell came up with another idea, centred on the twin preoccupations that have been gnawing 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.
