dear mayor miller
TRANSCRIPT
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.