The Prince Dances!

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is perhaps the best

loved modern book, a hit in English, French and countless

languages beyond, and it has been dramatized, danced and

musicalized many times since its first publication in 1943. To name

only two earlier efforts, the great Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos

Jobim wrote a too-little-heard musical version in Portuguese,

O Pequeno Príncipe, while the story became the vehicle for the

equally great Lerner & Loewe’s last collaboration – a filmed version

directed by Stanley Donen whose mostly unhappy history is

recounted in Lerner’s autobiography. Many another dance and

drama and opera and song cycle has been derived from it, from a

winsome early German marionette adaptation, Der Kleine Prinz, to

The Saddest Landscape’s grungy Forty Four Sunsets.

The success of such enterprises has been variable, in part

because the magic of Saint Exupéry’s fable is entrenched in its

episodic, often anti-dramatic form. What happens to the Prince,

escaped from his small asteroid to Earth, is magical, but essentially

mysterious, and part of the spell the book casts lies in our sense

that an intense, personal allegory of innocence and experience

– almost infinitely applicable to the twists and turns of our own

reluctant turns to adulthood – resides in the book’s pages without

being too neatly worked out as a program. To dramatize it is, in

part, to “explain” it, and to explain it is to betray it.

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By Adam Gopnik

Most of us know the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed

in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange

young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over

time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid,

where he lives alone with a single rose. He is instructed by a wise

if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake. Saint-

Exupéry’s own 1935 experience of being lost for almost a week in

the Arabian desert, with his memories of loneliness, hallucination,

impending death (and enveloping beauty) in the desert were one of

the many episodes of his life realized in Le Petit Prince. The central

love story of the Prince and Rose, in turn, derives from his stormy

love affair with his wife, Consuela, from whom the rose takes her

cough and her flightiness and her imperiousness and her sudden

swoons. (While he had been lost in the desert in 1935, she had

been publicly mourning his loss on her own “asteroid”, her table at

the Brasserie Lipp.)

Award-winning writer and essayist Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montréal. He is a staff writer for The

New Yorker, contributing non-fiction, fiction, memoir and criticism since 1986. His book Paris to the Moon is a New York Times

bestseller.

Illustrations by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from Le Petit Prince © Éditions GALLIMARD www.gallimard.fr.All of the copyrights of these illustrations are reserved. Unless authorized, all uses of the works other than for individual and private

consultation are forbidden.

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The Canadian choreographer Guillaume Côté, in attempting this

new adaptation of the tale for The National Ballet of Canada, has

stepped around, or past, the difficulties the story may present to

the stage by recognizing two essential, if hidden, elements in the

fable. First, the way that the tale neatly emerges from the narrator’s

own consciousness – downed in the desert far from water, he

hallucinates the tale as much as he experiences it. In a real sense,

the story takes place in the aviator’s mind, and Côté’s stylized,

anti-literal production captures this truth – the plane that dies in the

desert begins as a paper plane made in Saint-Exupéry’s hand: “A

giant paper plane that would crash inside the desert of this writer’s

mind!” as Côté himself has put it. (Côté and his collaborators were

led in this direction in part by the reminiscences of the Québec

philosopher Thomas De Koninck, at the time a child-friend of Saint-

Exupéry’s in Québec, who recalled the author-aviator constantly

making and sailing paper airplanes.

Second, that it is, above all, a tale of war and with it, of the battle

between murderous abstraction and particular experience. Saint-

Exupéry wrote this most French-seeming of fables in Manhattan

and Long Island, but with more than a soupçon of inspiration from

that time in Québec, where he lived in 1942, having escaped from

war devastated France to an unhappy exile in North America.

Saint-Exupéry’s sense of shame and confusion at the devastation

of France led him to search for a fable setting abstract ideas –

statistics, numbers, impersonal groupings of all sorts – against

specific loves. Like his great French contemporary Albert Camus,

Saint-Exupéry took from the war the need to engage in a

perpetual battle “between each man’s happiness and the illness

of abstraction,” meaning the act of distancing real emotion from

normal life. Saint-Exupéry wanted to place the person before

statistic. Le Petit Prince is an extended parable of the kinds and

follies of modern abstraction. The book moves from asteroid to

desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to

make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love

a rose.

The persistent triumph of specific experience is the books real

subject, and Côté has embraced it by using a stylized, poetic mise-

en-scène, and then by insistently placing the necessities of pure

dance before those of literal narration – Côté and his collaborators

seek to get at the mysterious essence of the story while avoiding

“telling” it too literally. The movement of the piece tracks that of

the story, but the dances are meant to stand for them, and by

themselves. The dance-demands of a pas de deux and corps are

as important to the piece as the tale they tell. “In order to serve

the balletic demands of a full ballet production” Côté notes, the

role of the wild birds has been expanded. “In the book the ‘wild

birds’ make a very quick appearance to take the little prince from

one planet to another. We have decided to make them quite a

prominent part of the story.”

In this way, through the rejection of mere literal mirroring, the

ballet seeks to capture some of that mysterious essence Saint-

Exupéry implanted in his tale. For dance is, above all, the supreme

artistic language of specific experience. Roses and dancers alike

delight us by being themselves. Resisting abstractions, unable to

present “arguments” – reduced by mime and resistant to allegory

– what dance does is to remind us of the specific possibilities and

particulars of the human body in movement. Working against the

limits of us poorly articulated primates; it displays our almost infinite

expressive capacity. By emphasizing the shadowy symbolic inner

realm where Saint-Exupéry’s imagination functioned best, and by

making dance for its own sake, Côté’s dramatization places the

story back exactly where it began and still belongs: in the work of

loving things for what they are, when they are – as they move, and

as they move us. n

Guillaume Côté with Artists of the Ballet. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim.

Dylan Tedaldi in rehearsal for Le Petit Prince. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim.

Le Petit Prince Characters

by Paula Citron

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When a choreographer sets an original full-length work on a large ballet company, there are usually two guiding principles. The first

is that there must be major roles for both men and women. The second is the inclusion of ensemble pieces for the Corps de Ballet.

In The National Ballet of Canada’s original production of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous novella Le Petit Prince, three of the five

major roles are performed by women, while the Corps de Ballet itself has been cleverly fashioned into a collective sixth character.

The core of the story remains the same. The novella is a fable about an Aviator who crashes his plane in the desert and is visited by

an extraterrestrial Little Prince of childlike stature. Symbolically, the desert is also a psychological state of mind for the Aviator.

Le Petit Prince/The Little Prince

The novella gives no hint as to the age of the Little Prince, but as he describes his

travels to the Aviator, he is clearly more than a mere child. His chief traits are his

insatiable curiosity and inquisitiveness. The Little Prince may not be of this world,

he does say he comes from an asteroid somewhere in space, but he is also not a

conventional extraterrestrial from science fiction literature. Rather, he is a universal

symbol of everything that is beautiful, true, pure and innocent, which is manifested

in movement that seems to defy gravity in its levitation and lightness. In some sense,

he is the spirit of our inner child whose presence within has been clouded over by our

daily adult grind.

L’Aviateur/The Aviator

So many events from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s own life are found in the

novella, such as crashing his plane in the Sahara, that the Aviator can be seen

as Saint-Exupéry himself. It is significant that the Aviator is alone in the desert,

which is a metaphor for the dryness of his imagination. Adulthood has stripped

him of his childhood wonder, and he is trapped in the mundane conventions of

being a grown-up. It is the Little Prince and the tales of his journey that ultimately

inspire the Aviator to become creative once again by returning to his writing. The

Little Prince is part of him, as are all the characters in the novella who exist in the

dreamscape of the Aviator’s imagination.

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La Rose/The Rose

The Little Prince’s relationship with the Rose reflects de Saint Exupéry’s troubled

relationship with his wife Consuelo. The Rose, which the Little Prince has so

lovingly tended on his asteroid, has not treated him well. She is temperamental,

selfish, vain, dismissive, ungrateful and completely self-absorbed. It is the

Rose’s mistreatment of the Little Prince that drives him to leave his home and

explore other worlds. While the Little Prince comes to realize that he misses his

Rose dreadfully and loves her deeply, the Rose also comes to understand that

she needs his love and is eager for his return.

Le Renard/The Fox

The Fox meets the Little Prince in the desert, and at first, she is a wild, sexy,

frivolous woman. Her free spirit is defined by lightning fast choreography, many

jumps and dangerous partnering. Nonetheless, it is the Fox who ultimately

explains to the Little Prince the concept of “taming”, which is building a warm

and loving relationship with someone. Rather than having a romantic encounter

with the Little Prince, the Fox makes him see the importance of the Rose in his

life. Parallel tamings occur between the Little Prince and the Fox, the Aviator

and the Little Prince, and the Little Prince and the Rose.

Le Serpent/The Snake

The Snake is the symbol of death. She is dominant and mysterious with

undulating movement that is calm, broad, huge, dramatic and commanding.

The Snake is the ruler of the desert who seductively lures people to their death.

The Aviator loathes her because he wants to live, but the Little Prince finds

her alluring because he believes, as she has told him, that his death will return

him to his asteroid and his beloved Rose. A pas de trois depicts this love/hate

relationship between the Snake, the Aviator and the Little Prince.

Les Oiseaux sauvages/The Wild Birds

This ensemble is made up of ten men and ten women. They are the force of

destiny, and are inspired by the Little Prince’s description of the birds who

lifted him off his asteroid so he could begin his travels. The Wild Birds are

the connecting links between the scenes, carrying the Little Prince from visit

to visit. They also become supporting characters. Their presence at first is

whimsical and benign as they convey the Little Prince on his visits to other

asteroids, yet as time progresses, so does their purpose. Once the Little Prince

comes to earth, the Wild Birds take on a darker role, becoming like vultures

waiting for their prey to die.