Alberta Ballet's Original Elton John Production

Half a dozen couples stand, stiff and silent as mannequins, on the hardwood floors of a large dance studio. They seem to be embracing; their faces close to each other as if whispering a secret. The room is hushed as rollicking gin-house piano music fills the air.

There is a clap, and a sharp voice begins to count, yelling: “One! Two! Three!” in time with the music’s beat. With each shout and clap, the dancers move swiftly into a tightly controlled pose of classical ballet: one woman is lifted high above her partner, another’s leg rests above her partner’s shoulder and another is angled away from her mate, tango-esque. The process is repeated; every clap of hands and shout reveals a new pose. It is mechanical and slightly disjointed, yet performed with the stunning agility and grace of highly trained dancers. There is something both beautiful and tragic in this sequence, like watching over and over the moment a carefree child is struck frozen by fear. And then, bizarrely, there is a man on roller skates weaving his way between the partners. The music is almost deafening; familiar but new as well. Behind the roller skater struts a sinister, bowler-capped fellow, clicking his heels. It is a captivating scene.

Suddenly, the man on roller skates topples and splays face down on the floor, breaking the spell of the dance with a round of laughter. He adjusts his elbow pads and takes an offered hand to help him upright. This is the moment Jean Grand-Maître, artistic director of Alberta Ballet, hopes won’t be repeated in May when his production finally opens. The dancers, in their sweat pants, leg warmers and bandanas, collapse into relaxed poses as the rehearsal is momentarily put on hold.

It is October 2009, seven months before audiences will fill Calgary’s Jubilee Auditorium — dressed in appropriately outlandish attire, hopes Grand-Maître — to see the real thing: a ballet commissioned, and created in partnership with, the legendary Sir Elton John.

It is called Love Lies Bleeding, a slightly sappy title that was created well after the show’s choreography and one that seems at odds with what Grand-Maître claims is an “unsentimental” look at Elton John’s life. There was another late addition to the headline as well. Long after the music had been chosen, the dances choreographed, and the marketing campaign launched, the title was transformed from Elton, a collaborative work between Elton John and Alberta Ballet, to Love Lies Bleeding: A ballet inspired by and featuring the music of Bernie Taupin and Sir Elton John.

“Bernie Taupin wrote almost all the lyrics for his songs,” explains Grand-Maître, “They’re the dynamic duo. Together, they wrote a biographical album called Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Elton is Captain Fantastic, and the Brown Dirt Cowboy is Bernie Taupin; he was a big cowboy guy.”

So it is more than a dancer on roller skates that has this production launching into the unfamiliar. First, there is the story. Written by Grand-Maître, the ballet’s narrative was the product of months of research and a lifelong admiration for the subject. Grand-Maître calls the work a “semi-abstract biography,” blending John’s personal story (a rise from humble beginnings to stardom and all its trappings) with his musical evolution (the slow shift from glam-rock to pop ballads), and the course of history around him (most pivotally, the devastating sweep of AIDS through America in the mid-1980s). John has been an object of scrutiny and public imagination for decades, and Grand-Maître says John’s portrayal here will be surprising, “unsentimental, melancholy, in-your-face,” and surreal.

“I basically wanted to tell the story of a young child who was never meant to become a superstar and does become a superstar,” says Grand-Maître, “He was a little pudgy guy from Middlesex, a county outside of London which was lower-middle class. He didn’t have the physique of George Michael, but he had the talent, and then was pushed so hard in his career.

“He started depending on addictions to get through it all, drugs and alcohol; had a couple of suicide attempts and then had a return. He survived. It’s a triumph at the end, because he raises hundreds of millions of dollars now for all charities, especially AIDS-related charities. He married a gentleman from Toronto, David Furnish, and came back to life. He’s performing for all the right reasons now. It’s a very dramatic story for a ballet, so I knew I had a good libretto in that.”

Then, there is the music: the show features 13 of John’s hit songs from the 1970s to the present, but many of the arrangements used will be new to listeners. Grand-Maître scoured the pop music universe to find bootlegged, live and rare versions of John’s work. The concert version he selected of the 1972 hit “Rocket Man,” for instance, is almost unrecognizable for its lengthy piano jam and the rich timbre of a young Elton. This is not your typical AM radio fare. The score Grand-Maître has chosen showcases John’s musicality, diversity of style and the struggles and triumphs of his personal journey.

And then there are the dancers themselves: Kelley McKinlay and Yukichi Hattori, who are no strangers to Alberta audiences, will be playing the lead role of Elton John on alternating nights. McKinlay is a crowd favourite, and has been a principal in a number of Alberta Ballet productions, including Romeo and Juliet and Carmen, and has even been immortalized in the Alberta Ballet mural at Macleod Trail and 12th Avenue S.W. Having a background in jazz and modern dance made McKinlay ideal for the role, which Grand-Maître describes as “kinetic and very demanding.” Hattori has also been seen in a number of plum roles each season, including the title character in The Nutcracker and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He turned choreographer this season, too, for an Alberta Ballet production of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins and the High Performance Rodeo production of Tubular Bells.

In addition to these and other familiar faces, 10 new dancers have joined Alberta Ballet this year and will be featured in the production. They are on 50-week contracts and bring the company to a total of 30 dancers, the largest it’s ever been. It is a sign of financial stability for Alberta Ballet, virtually unheard of in a year where tight budgets and cutbacks have plagued arts organizations across the country. Advance interest in this production has boosted subscription sales, explains Grand-Maître, while a raised public profile from touring productions and a contract for the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games opening ceremony helps, too.

As rehearsal resumes, Noëllie Conjeaud, a new company member from France, is asked to step forward and demonstrate the next sequence of movements. She is a strong dancer, both physically and in her stage presence. The other dancers watch her warily, impressed again by the complexity and energy of Grand-Maître’s choreography. Heads bobbing, their arms lift in casual, graceful echoes of Conjeaud’s demonstration.

The company itself is also on the move. Since June 2008, it has toured The Fiddle and the Drum, a collaboration between Alberta Ballet and legendary Canadian songstress Joni Mitchell, all over North America. It was performed during the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver, before going on the road again with shows in Seattle and Los Angeles. And, just for good measure, the company staged a pre-holiday production of The Nutcracker in Victoria, B.C. It’s an exhausting schedule, but one that has the company gaining recognition and praise across the country and internationally. This kind of attention, for a ballet, is surprising.

While his first celebrity collaboration with Mitchell brought an impressive amount of recognition to the troupe, Grand-Maître knows John is “300 times bigger than Joni Mitchell in the public’s eye.”

The attention is indeed growing since the collaboration with John was announced. Within a few hours of the press release, media was reporting on the new production halfway around the world, and interest in touring the show has already come from Asia and Europe. John himself has mentioned the Alberta Ballet in several interviews, including on CNN and in the Los Angeles Times. When asked to describe his routine by CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, John said, “Let’s put it like this: I have a musical nominated for 15 Tonys, I’m doing an animation movie for Disney that I’m writing the music for, I’m producing a show called “Spectacle” with Elvis Costello for the Sundance Chanel, which is an incredibly well-received show. I’m going to do an album with Leon Russell next year, I have a ballet going to be done by the Alberta Ballet, I have the AIDS foundation, I have my management company [in] which we manage lots of young artists, and I still have free time.”

John could not be reached for comment on this story, as he was on tour across The United States with Billy Joel until March 10 2010, when he flies to South Africa to perform for a week. After that, he will appear in Mexico, Morocco, Serbia, England, Israel and six other countries in the following three months. It is during this hectic world-wide tour that Love Lies Bleeding will premiere, and John hopes to pop in to Calgary to see it. It’s clear that what is taking an enormous effort and providing unprecedented attention for the ballet troupe is simply part of John’s routine.

Although it seems like small potatoes next to John’s brand of success, Alberta’s arts and culture scene is booming and this ballet is indicative of the calibre of work.

“I think artists in Calgary feel like they have something to prove,” says Gordon Sombrowski, past director of the Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival and a board member of Alberta Ballet. “We’re always comparing ourselves to cities that are five or 10 times larger than Calgary! For a city of 1.2 million, a province of nearly 4 million, we are punching way above our weight. Montreal is still pretty cutting-edge, but otherwise I think there’s a lot more interesting and edgier art happening here than anywhere in Canada.”

Lindsay Fischer, ballet master at the National Ballet of Canada and director of the Banff Centre’s professional summer dance program, says a new arts narrative is emerging in Alberta.

“Alberta Ballet, and Jean Grand-Maître in particular, is making great strides in emphasizing that Alberta is a place where culture is valued,” he says, “When you share a body of images, or dance or song that everyone recognizes as their own, you don’t have to talk about it anymore — it just is; it’s the truth. We recognize Alberta Ballet as an expression of ourselves. Part of being an Albertan now is saying, ‘This is our company.’” In the spring of 2009, Grand-Maître was named director of choreography for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. He was responsible for designing and directing the movements of more than 4,000 performers at the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as nightly “victory ceremonies” at the 60,000-seat BC Place stadium. Among those watching Grand-Maître’s work were an estimated 10,000 reporters, sharing observations with their hometown audiences, and an additional 3-billion people watching the events on television.

But it wasn’t the spectacle of the Olympics that drew Sir Elton John to the Alberta Ballet and Jean Grand-Maître, it was Joni Mitchell. In early 2008, John’s agent was dining with Mitchell. Mitchell had just finished her collaboration with Grand-Maître on The Fiddle and the Drum, an intensely personal and political work combining her music and visual art with new choreography.

Intrigued, John, who was heading to Calgary for a concert, watched the ballet on DVD and invited Grand-Maître and eight company dancers including McKinlay to meet him after his show. He plied them with questions about The Fiddle and the Drum, gave them a tour of his dressing room (filled with lavish red velvet and tiny dogs, reports Grand-Maître), as well as front row concert tickets, and even dedicated “Tiny Dancer” to the enamoured guests.

Less than a year later, Grand-Maître and Alberta Ballet executive director Darryl Lindenbach were standing in John’s Las Vegas hotel room pitching ideas for a new spectacle to be titled Elton.  Since then, Grand-Maître has been in contact with John’s managers, who receive weekly updates on the design, choreography and music choices. John weighs in on occasion, but seems to trust the process completely.

“When Elton sits in that theatre, I want him to be moved, to laugh, to cry, to even be surprised by how we’ve portrayed him. Elton John is my barometer for success; I want him to like it, that’s all,” says Grand-Maître, “To have success you must capture the singer, and their life and their music, and for that you need collaboration. You need to work with them. I’ve been lucky to have these conversations with Joni and Elton, so that the ballet is not off on a sideline having nothing to do with what these singers were about.”

Like The Fiddle and the Drum, this show will not only be moving in spirit, but visually spectacular. There will be extraordinary costumes — from nuns on roller skates to sequined baseball players to gladiators — and a large multimedia component. Grand-Maître has assembled a team of designers from across Canada and Europe, including Cirque du Soleil set designer Guillaume Lord, who also staged Alberta Ballet’s popular Romeo and Juliet, and sound designer Claude Lemelin, who worked with Grand-Maître on Vigil of Angels and last year’s Dangerous Liaisons.

Grand-Maître’s choreography may be demanding and new, but theatricality is his trademark. Since he came on board in 2002, Alberta Ballet’s programming has seen more brazen lust and violence than most Hollywood scripts; his productions of Carmen and Dangerous Liaisons, for example, required cautionary notes for audience, some of whom were still shocked by the blatant sexual scenarios. Far from alienating the traditional ballet audience, these bold productions have gained critical and popular praise at home and abroad.

“Classical ballet has become a very broad concept in the 21st century, because the lifeblood of any art form is in new creation,” says Fischer. “Much contemporary work from a ballet company remains rooted in traditions that are 400 or 500 years old; by creating new work you make it contemporary — otherwise what’s the point?”

With Love Lies Bleeding, there is also a specific audience that Grand-Maître is hoping to reach. “I’m inviting the entire gay community,” he says, happily. “I’ve reserved tickets for drag queens every night. The invitation will ask them to wear evening gowns, but low wigs. In fact, I’m going to have the entire audience dress up in the ethos of Elton John, with sunglasses, boas … the whole nine yards. I want it to be a party as soon as the audience comes into the theatre; a huge party in that crazy burlesque world.”

In keeping with the cabaret theme, and the experience of North American gay life over the past 50 years, dark undertones lurk beneath the fun and wild glamour. “There are a series of demons, visually inspired by A Clockwork Orange, that keep appearing and stalk Elton throughout the ballet,” says Grand-Maître, adding references to the protagonist’s sexual orientation are fraught with tension.

John was, after all, hounded in the early days of his career for being a sexual deviant, and set precedent by suing a British tabloid in the 1980s for libel. While costumes and choreography can help tell his story, Taupin and John’s own work is the primary inspiration.

“For example, the song ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ [is] a popular, light rock song,” says Grand-Maître. “Originally, it was written when [John] was about to get married and tried to commit suicide. Another singer, Long John Baldry, found him with his head in an oven, got him out of there, and told him, ‘You shouldn’t be getting married.’ He didn’t get married. He took off and wrote ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight.’ So that story is really associated with marriage. I’m using it [with] three angels who appear when he’s almost dead from addiction and bring him back to life. So it’s someone who saved his life from drugs, not from some woman he was supposed to marry.”

Sombrowski, whose Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival has been programmed for a diverse queer community since 1998, says John’s story is important to all generations in the gay community.

“For people who are somewhat older, and would have grown up with his music at a time when being gay was a struggle, this is an incredible affirmation,” he says, “They are familiar with his personal struggles in finding out who he was, and how to express himself. For young lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender people, it will help to know that this person who struggled with these issues, and growing up in the public eye, has landed safely on the other side, has found success and, in fact, married a Canadian.

“They’ll see that [as an LGBT person] you can live a happy, healthy life. As an art form, it will have an impact on all audiences, of course.”

Surviving fame and addiction, sharing an incredible talent with the world, setting fashion trends in show business, raising millions for charity and finding life-long love and companionship: it is an inspiring story for anyone. Translating that story — and star power — into action is also a goal of the production. Grand-Maître plans to host an AIDS fundraiser in conjunction with Love Lies Bleeding, something Sombrowski says is critical.

“Elton’s incredible dedication to AIDS causes will highlight the fact that the disease is still there; it’s still a concern,” he says, “The problem still exists and it still needs to be dealt with.”

Back in the rehearsal hall on that chilly October afternoon, the biggest problem to be addressed is still that of the dancer on roller skates. McKinlay and Grand-Maître are conferring over the proper posture, speed and sequence for the artist on wheels. Sketches of costumes line the walls: there is John in a white sequined jacket, open at the chest, sitting with a Siberian tiger; there is John in oversized red-rimmed sunglasses, his tawny hair splayed chaotically around his ears. Hattori is staring at them, perhaps imagining himself in costume, without the elbow and knee pads.

“He’ll likely be half-naked in this scene,” says former marketing coordinator Megan Bailey.
“If you can imagine it; it’s probably in this show.” 

Love Lies Bleeding plays at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium May 6 to 8. Visit albertaballet.com for tickets and information.