What: Alberta Ballet’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (set to music by Sarah McLachlan)
When: Nov. 8 and 9, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Royal Theatre
Tickets: $29 to $85 (including student and senior discounts) at rmts.bc.ca or 250-386-6121.
Additional show Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m. at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo. Tickets are $65 ($60 for members and groups) at porttheatre.com and 250-754-8550.
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If you’ve ever been to a wedding, funeral or high-school graduation, you know that Sarah McLachlan’s songbook is Canada’s go-to soundtrack for celebrations of life.
So it seems only natural that when Alberta Ballet artistic director Jean Grand-Maître began choreographing a ballet set to McLachlan’s songs, he created a story dedicated to the “odyssey” of a woman’s life, from first romantic encounter to mature love and the emotional landmarks in between.
For McLachlan, it felt natural, too.
“I write from a really emotional place and that tends to be the focus of the songs,” she said in an interview. “So I think it’s probably a relatively natural translation, to take that energy and emotion and translate that into dance.”
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, which debuted in 2011 and travels to Nanaimo’s Port Theatre Nov. 6 and Victoria’s Royal Theatre Nov. 8 and 9, is one of several ballets Grand-Maître has created with a popular musician as its starting point. Each brings physical form to some of the emotions and themes that dominate those musicians’ lives and music, he has said in past interviews.
With Elton John, it was about repression and addiction; with Joni Mitchell it was about war; with k.d. lang it was about how the Prairies shaped her. (Alberta Ballet will debut a second ballet made in collaboration with Mitchell this spring, set to her love songs.)
With McLachlan, it’s about the female ethos.
The singer and choreographer first worked together in 2010, when McLachlan performed in the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremonies, for which Grand-Maître acted as director of choreography. McLachlan was impressed with his work immediately and eager to collaborate again.
“It was like, wow, this is incredible to watch these human beings translate energy and emotion through their bodies and through their limbs and through their face. It was just really magical to witness,” she said.
She was involved from the beginning, when Grand-Maître sat her down for a five- or six-hour session of questions about her songs, her stories and her perceptions of female archetypes.
“It’s not based on my life, but he spoke with me and spoke with a lot of women about their stories and included that in the piece,” McLachlan said. “He thought a lot of what I write about is quite universal to women, which I tend to agree with.”
From there, McLachlan gave Grand-Maître “carte blanche” to use any songs he wanted, she said. The program runs from Hold On to Ice Cream and Angel.
When McLachlan sat in on a rehearsal for the first time in Alberta, it was a full house. The media was there, as well as Grand-Maître, and all eyes were on McLachlan as a pair of dancers danced a pas de deux to the emotionally charged song Hold On, eager to see her response.
“I remember just welling up, I was just overwhelmed with emotion,” McLachlan said. “It was just so beautiful and so sad and so glorious. I was just thinking, oh my god, everybody’s watching me and I’m just a bucket, a mess. Of course, Jean was gleeful, like, ‘Oh yes! We made her cry!’ ”
For McLachlan, too, it was the sign of something good.
McLachlan is used to questions about the inspiration for her songs, but she said what’s important is the way that her songs are interpreted by her audience. To see it interpreted physically was an emotional experience.
“With any art, it’s what you glean from it. What resonates with you about it, that’s what’s important,” she said. “So I love being witness to what Jean created. … I think it worked brilliantly.”
And what McLachlan got from it was a new appreciation of dance. Although she has involved dancers in her performances in the past, her personal experience with ballet was limited to a viewing of The Nutcracker, as well as two years of lessons at age six and seven that confirmed she had two left feet.
Now, she said, she’s seeing the form in a new way.
“It was a different education for me and a bit of an awakening to something really incredible and beautiful,” she said. “It sort of made me fall in love with dance.”