The Prince Dances! By Adam Gopnik 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. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is perhaps the best Most of us know the basic bones of the story: an aviator, downed loved modern book, a hit in English, French and countless in the desert and facing long odds of survival, encounters a strange languages beyond, and it has been dramatized, danced and young person, neither man nor really boy, who, it emerges over musicalized many times since its first publication in 1943. To name time, has travelled from his solitary home on a distant asteroid, only two earlier efforts, the great Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos where he lives alone with a single rose. He is instructed by a wise Jobim wrote a too-little-heard musical version in Portuguese, if cautious fox, and by a sinister angel of death, the snake. Saint- O Pequeno Príncipe, while the story became the vehicle for the Exupéry’s own 1935 experience of being lost for almost a week in equally great Lerner & Loewe’s last collaboration – a filmed version the Arabian desert, with his memories of loneliness, hallucination, directed by Stanley Donen whose mostly unhappy history is impending death (and enveloping beauty) in the desert were one of recounted in Lerner’s autobiography. Many another dance and the many episodes of his life realized in Le Petit Prince. The central drama and opera and song cycle has been derived from it, from a love story of the Prince and Rose, in turn, derives from his stormy winsome early German marionette adaptation, Der Kleine Prinz, to love affair with his wife, Consuela, from whom the rose takes her The Saddest Landscape’s grungy Forty Four Sunsets. cough and her flightiness and her imperiousness and her sudden swoons. (While he had been lost in the desert in 1935, she had The success of such enterprises has been variable, in part been publicly mourning his loss on her own “asteroid”, her table at because the magic of Saint Exupéry’s fable is entrenched in its the Brasserie Lipp.) episodic, often anti-dramatic form. What happens to the Prince, escaped from his small asteroid to Earth, is magical, but essentially 1 2 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. 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. The Canadian choreographer Guillaume Côté, in attempting this war devastated France to an unhappy exile in North America. new adaptation of the tale for The National Ballet of Canada, has Saint-Exupéry’s sense of shame and confusion at the devastation stepped around, or past, the difficulties the story may present to of France led him to search for a fable setting abstract ideas – the stage by recognizing two essential, if hidden, elements in the statistics, numbers, impersonal groupings of all sorts – against fable. First, the way that the tale neatly emerges from the narrator’s specific loves. Like his great French contemporary Albert Camus, own consciousness – downed in the desert far from water, he Saint-Exupéry took from the war the need to engage in a hallucinates the tale as much as he experiences it. In a real sense, perpetual battle “between each man’s happiness and the illness the story takes place in the aviator’s mind, and Côté’s stylized, of abstraction,” meaning the act of distancing real emotion from anti-literal production captures this truth – the plane that dies in the normal life. Saint-Exupéry wanted to place the person before desert begins as a paper plane made in Saint-Exupéry’s hand: “A statistic. Le Petit Prince is an extended parable of the kinds and giant paper plane that would crash inside the desert of this writer’s follies of modern abstraction. The book moves from asteroid to mind!” as Côté himself has put it. (Côté and his collaborators were desert, from fable and comedy to enigmatic tragedy, in order to led in this direction in part by the reminiscences of the Québec make one recurrent point: You can’t love roses. You can only love philosopher Thomas De Koninck, at the time a child-friend of Saint- a rose. Exupéry’s in Québec, who recalled the author-aviator constantly making and sailing paper airplanes. The persistent triumph of specific experience is the books real subject, and Côté has embraced it by using a stylized, poetic mise- Second, that it is, above all, a tale of war and with it, of the battle en-scène, and then by insistently placing the necessities of pure between murderous abstraction and particular experience. Saint- dance before those of literal narration – Côté and his collaborators Exupéry wrote this most French-seeming of fables in Manhattan seek to get at the mysterious essence of the story while avoiding and Long Island, but with more than a soupçon of inspiration from “telling” it too literally. The movement of the piece tracks that of that time in Québec, where he lived in 1942, having escaped from 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 Guillaume Côté with Artists of the Ballet. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim. 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 Dylan Tedaldi in rehearsal for Le Petit Prince. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim. 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 loving15 things for what they are, when16 they are – as they move, and as they move us. n Le Petit Prince Characters by Paula Citron 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. 1 2 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.