On the National Ballet of Canada’s Instagram page, you can find an underwater image of first soloist Tanya Howard twisting on the toes of her green pointe shoes. The glassy reflection at the water’s surface makes her body extend in two directions, so that she has four blurring arms and a sweeping mass of orange hair.
Click through to the company’s website and you’ll find tightly edited videos of dancers in the studio, a newly commissioned essay by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik and a ruminative piece of writing by University of Laval professor and philosopher Thomas de Koninck (who met Antoine de Siant-Exupéry in 1942).
These are just a few notable stops along the savvy promotional campaign launched by the National Ballet in the lead up to the event of their season: the world premiere of Le Petit Prince. It’s the company’s first full-length commission in over a decade and it has required all hands on deck – a massive undertaking for set-builders, dancers, seamstresses, musicians and publicists alike. The ballet has been in production for several years and was funded, in part, by a $2-million private donation, the largest single gift for a new production in the company’s history. It features an all-star team of Canadian artists: choreographer Guillaume Côté, theatre/opera/ballet designer Michael Levine and composer Kevin Lau.
For a debut of this scale, words such as “original” and “groundbreaking” would seem like the operative ones to float. But a few weeks before opening night, Côté lets me in on an endearing bit of back story: It isn’t actually his first balletic encounter with the book. There’s a cherished childhood memory that planted the seed for the whole project, a bare-bones production at his parent’s ballet school in Lac-St-Jean, Que., in which he danced the titular role.
“I had this beautiful pas de deux – I don’t know, maybe it was terrible.” He shakes his head, chuckling. “But to me it felt really beautiful. It was with the snake, this woman in a unitard – I just remember it being so special and I remember people loving it. It’s how I discovered the book and fell in love Saint-Exupéry.”
Côté, who has been a much-lauded principal dancer with the company for 12 years, is also the senior of its two choreographic associates. In person, the 34-year-old is warm and unaffected and speaks without the slightest trace of ego as he explains how Le Petit Prince, his first full-evening work, came to be. While he originally thought he’d veer toward the contemporary side of the spectrum in terms of choreographic style, he found that, as he got to work in the studio, he was drawn more and more to a classical lexicon. In fact, he muses that adapting Saint-Exupéry’s novella has made him realize how much he loves classical ballet.
“I think, with my past work, I’ve tried to stay away from any classical repertoire, any classical movements. It’s been a funny process because I realized that I love the classical lines and love the classical repertoire,” he says. “There’s an element of purity, there’s an element of beauty to the whole story that, to me, caters so beautifully to the idea of softness and anti-gravity. I tried to go extremely contemporary at first, and tried to break new ground – but I found I couldn’t tell the story that I wanted to tell with that vocabulary and I don’t know why. I had a conversation with [designer Michael Levine] – I was worried about a sequence looking too classical – and he looked at me and said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ ”
Levine is known for his inventive and evocative sets for the likes of the Metropolitan Opera, London’s Royal Opera and the British experimental theatre company Complicite. While Côté felt confident tackling the choreographic component of the production, he wanted to collaborate with someone who had more expertise with blocking and staging. So Levine’s role in Le Petit Prince goes well beyond that of a designer; he’s essentially Côté’s co-director, too.
“The best theatre for me happens when you don’t feel like the director’s job is left off where the designer’s job begins, that everything is just placed on top of each other,” Levine tells me. “The ideal is to achieve everything coming together at the same time.”
Levine and Côté had the opportunity to test drive their artistic relationship when they adapted Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for the National last year. The 40-minute work consisted of seven vignettes on a sparsely dressed stage with poetic detailing – a dangling, exposed light bulb, a radiant window of morning light, an overflowing sink. But while there were beautiful moments and some interesting sequences of dancing, Côté felt as though the piece didn’t entirely cohere. “Some things worked really well,” he says. “Others didn’t.”
The Sartre project was fundamentally different from the Saint-Exupéry one in the sense that it required inventing a story out of a plotless text. The challenge with Le Petit Prince has been something like the opposite: not slavishly reproducing the narrative for the stage. Levine explains that he likes to think of adaptation as a process of extraction, not replication. “You want to touch on the poetry of it,” he says.
Figuring out what direction to take with the score was also a huge consideration. Côté deliberated between mixing and matching existing music, as is sometimes done with new ballets (such as John Neumeier’s masterful Nijinsky, which the National presented in 2014) and commissioning a full-length, original work. But the question was settled when Côté heard Kevin Lau’s original violin concerto for the Toronto Symphony. “When Kevin’s music jumped out at me as being very narrative, I thought, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’”
Côté, an accomplished composer himself (he’s written ballet orchestras for Alberta Ballet and the Stuttgart Ballet), began brainstorming with Lau in 2012. “One of the things that has bothered me in some of the new scores of ballets is that they sound more soundtrackish than like actual orchestral concert music. And for me, because I come from a concert background, I want music that is just as interesting as the dancing.”
Lau had never written for the ballet before, nor had he ever read Saint-Exupéry’s novella, but as soon as he sat down with Le Petit Prince, he felt drawn into its depictions of sorrow, adventure and love. “For me, music flows quite naturally when I’m immersed in a story. At its heart, the book seems to be about a journey that the little prince and the aviator embark on together to discover what’s meaningful in life. And so what I wanted to do with the music was to tap into that feeling of pursuing meaning.”
All three artists agree that the themes of Le Petit Prince are rich and expansive, making them tricky to sum up. But Côté tells me that he keeps returning to the idea of “taming,” which he thinks plays out in every relationship in the book. Taming means more than the literal act of domesticating an animal; it’s about experiencing love, be it romantic or platonic, and the perils and rewards that come with that. Once you grow close to someone else, you risk experiencing loss.
“You have this idea of how do you develop a relationship? How do people get to know each other?” Côte asks. “It’s one of those themes that is relevant today more than ever because I feel like self-investment is becoming more and more sparse. We’re so instant, we’re so quick. We can be quick because it’s Tinder, it’s easier” – he swipes a fake phone – “But there’s such a beauty in the concept of real investment. Meaning comes out of investment.”
Le Petit Prince runs from June 4-12 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Arts in Toronto (national.ballet.ca).