Joni Mitchell Community's Journal (original) (raw)
New York Times, February 4, 2007
Dance
Working Three Shifts, and Outrage Overtime
By DAVID YAFFE
Los Angeles
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.”