During "If," Kipling's verse is staged as a street scene, a place where young people prefer dancing to warring, and where hip-hop, modern dance, ballet and jazz collide. Grand-Maitre compares it to a Mardi Gras carnival. "Hold on," Mitchell sings in the song's refrain, but the dancers are going wild.

Grand-Maitre said, "What she's saying in the song is to hold on to that life and that flow." He and Mitchell met twice in Los Angeles and talked on the phone a dozen times. But while she will be on hand for the last week of rehearsals (and will film them for a documentary she's making), she was not directly involved in the dance itself.

"I never really explained to her what I was choreographing physically, but rather how I was staging it," Grand-Maitre recalled. "Like when Mary Magdalene appeared on a screen during 'Sex Kills' or when Killer Kyle in 'Beat of Black Wings' transforms from innocence to aggressive behavior. I told her I wanted to create that in a dance performance. She loved that."

Referring to the ballet's title song Mitchell explained: "I was using the fiddle to symbolize peace and the drum to symbolize militancy. Those Edith Piaf and Noel Coward songs were all marches. That was the groove of the World War II era. White rhythm is waltzes, marches and the polka. In Africa rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant."

All in all, it's a far cry from the project Grand-Maitre envisioned when he wrote that first timid letter to Mitchell. "It's a hell of a lot better than what I had, and I feel very invigorated by these ideas."

Once you get past the security gates, Mitchell's house feels like a pocket of middle-class comfort in the midst of zillionaire Beverly Hills. In some ways, life is still as it was in 1974, when she bought the house: She has no computer, no voice mail, no cell phone and no e-mail. At one point, when we tried to remember one of her lyrics, we scrolled through my iPod. She said it was the first time she had listened to one.

As she played some tracks from her new album, she was still adding and subtracting, wincing at lines that struck her as too sentimental.

"Listen to this song," she insisted at one point. But she wouldn't really let me, or I couldn't sufficiently take it in. Her conversation competed with her music, and I was getting double Joni.

Talking about the ballet turned into a kind of circle game. The dance was about the war, and the war led her to write, which in turn meant talking about what makes her write in the first place. There was simply too much to express.

"You've only got so much space, and that's the point," she said. "That's the art. In a very short space, you need pertinent details while knowing what to leave out." One song she's still revising is called "Shine."