"I haven't written in 10 years, and what's coming out of me is all sociological and theological complaint," she said while staring at the lighted end of an American Spirit cigarette. She sees herself as a proud heretic: "At first I thought I was going over new territory, but then I realized that many of the people who went over this territory were killed."

"The Fiddle and the Drum" features two of her new songs: "If," based on the Rudyard Kipling poem about war and stoicism ("Just about my favorite poem," she says), and "If I Had a Heart, I'd Cry," criticizing what she calls the current "holy war." The rest of the ballet, named for a 1970 anti-war ballad from her second album, "Clouds," is dominated by material from her '80s and '90s albums, which are more rhythmically charged (and hence better for dance) than her earlier work.

The backdrop is composed of stills from Mitchell's mixed-media art exhibition. One night while she was flipping through "The Gold Diggers of 1937," CNN and the History Channel on her ancient television (she is something of a Luddite and only recently got a decent stereo system), her screen went on the fritz, blurring images and turning everything a radioactive emerald. Faces melted away, and lines of bodies seeped into the frightening indistinctness of nightmare, as though the malfunctioning television were offering a metaphorical political commentary. She could no longer tell soldier from chorus girl, battle casualty from lover, the dancer from the dance.

In "The Fiddle and the Drum" members of the muscular young dance troupe mimic these images, marching down the stage like soldiers, their bodies almost naked and painted jade green, looking as if they had emerged from the artwork projected above them. They are both graceful and military, tinged with the color of new life and nuclear holocaust, and move to what Mitchell called "the beats of war."

With nine songs and 27 dancers, the result is equal parts Busby Berkeley spectacle, political jeremiad and rock opera, a collection of songs that form an essay on war and incipient environmental apocalypse. Young, athletic bodies are sent off to kill and die. The Earth is electronically set for destruction. Dire biblical prophecies and the grave warnings of Indian chiefs ring true.

But Grand-Maitre wanted to avoid the literalism that marred Twyla Tharp's recent Bob Dylan musical, choreographed as it was with jugglers and clowns who came down to do tricks for you. ("Dylan's not a dancer," Mitchell added. "I am.") So when she sings the line "In some office sits a poet," the choreographer was quick to say, we will not actually see a poet sitting in an office. The approach is more abstract — allegorical but not obvious.

"We're going to open the curtain" Grand-Maitre explained, "and people who are expecting a ballet will get something more like a rock concert."