ON ‘PRINCE,’ SIX HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

When first contacted by Los Angeles Chamber Ballet about composing the score for the company’s ballet version of “The Little Prince,” Lloyd Rodgers remembers thinking “it was crazy to want to do this as a narrative work.”

After all, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s 1943 book is a somber fable about an aviator who crash-lands in the Sahara and meets a diminutive extraterrestrial refugee trying to regain his place in the stars. (No, he doesn’t phone home.)

It offers balletic adapters a number of philosophical meditations and two-character discussion scenes but practically no action. There are also potential problems of scale (that little prince and an even smaller snake), major shifts in tone and an enigmatic ending touching on issues of death, loss and transcendence.

“In some ways, ‘The Little Prince’ may be more deeply frightening and intense, because of its simplicity and whimsical surface, than things that have a more obvious angst -in-the-pants style,” Rodgers comments.

Victoria Koenig agrees. Co-founder, with Raiford Rogers, of the 5-year-old, 12-dancer company, she recalls talking with the composer about “how if you really wanted to do ‘The Little Prince,’ you’d just make a Zen ballet: lots of meditation and not much movement.”

Instead, the $30,000, full-evening ballet that premieres Friday at the Japan America Theatre contains far more movement than meditation and is notable for reasons other than its relationship to an unlikely literary source. Indeed, “The Little Prince” is arguably unlike any recent project in classical dance for both its uncompromising contemporary style and unusual collaborative genesis.

By extending the look and sound of post-modern dance-spectacle into the conservative realm of narrative ballet, it sets the seal on a decade of increasingly ambitious and popular intermedia productions in Los Angeles.

At the same time, the circumstances of its creation recall the period early in this century when Sergei Diaghilev lured important young painters and composers to work for his Ballets Russes in collaboration with his house choreographers.

In both eras, designers not primarily associated with theater projects and composers epitomizing contemporary trends burst through conventional approaches into new creative relationships, sometimes providing a highly specific context for dancing, sometimes threatening to overwhelm it.

However “The Little Prince” ups the ante of collaborative risk by involving no less than six distinctive artistic personalities: composer Rodgers, designer Mark Stock and four choreographers familiar from past Los Angeles Chamber Ballet mixed-repertory programs--Koenig and Rogers, Patrick Frantz and Stanley Holden.

In age, background and outlook, this is a highly heterogeneous group and in conversations about the project many members confess to having had initial misgivings. Rodgers, for instance, says he worried about being reduced to the role of musical “interior decorator,” while Frantz reveals that at first he was “not excited” by Rodgers’ adynamic, structuralist score.

No longer. During the rehearsal process, Rodgers seemed to emerge as a key figure in the six-way collaboration, and is now praised by Frantz for his “deep understanding of what we needed”--and by Koenig for “his strong point of view and willingness to share his ideas.” Certainly, it is his cool, formal lyricism, his bright tempos, symmetrical structures, ostinato-type patterns--and what he calls his “objectivity toward musical materials”--that gives this “Little Prince” much of its post-modern sensibility.

Although his background includes scores for what he describes as “very large, epic pieces” by Pavasio Dance Theater of Orange County in the 1970s and for more intimate, more recent choreographies by Karen Goodman and Margaret Schuette, Rodgers is best known on the local dance scene for his music over the past five years for Rudy Perez’s avant-garde abstractions. He has also taught at Cal State Fullerton since 1972.

His 70-minute “Little Prince” score--to be played live by seven musicians (an augmented version of his well-known Cartesian Reunion Memorial Orchestra)--is Rodgers’ first narrative work and his first for ballet. But he calls it “a continuation of what I’ve been doing” and declares himself “completely comfortable with the subject.”

“I think the book is a very serious work about the discipline of self-sacrifice and the responsibility of love,” he remarks. “The fact that it’s a quasi-children’s book creates counter-resonances with its profound spiritual content. It seems very ‘80s and I feel very close to it in a way.”

In contrast to Rodgers’ identification with “The Little Prince” and sense of career continuity, Mark Stock considers his set and costume designs for the ballet “less personal” creations than his spare yet Romantic paintings and etchings, despite elements of mystery, oblique narrative and a sense of the macabre in each. Indeed, he found that the costumes, in particular, didn’t come easily: “I had to pull something out of myself as a visual artist that I’m not used to doing, go further than I would normally do. I had a difficult time.”

Like Rodgers, Stock had previously collaborated with Rudy Perez and also created/performed gallery pieces with visual artist Phil Garner. His work is currently on exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum (through March 14) and in a number of important permanent collections, including the National Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

However, two years ago--during a temporary slump in his career--Stock was reduced to working as a scenic artist in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for TV commercials, movies-of-the-week and music videos. Almost ruefully, he admits that the specialized knowledge and skills he gained during this unwanted professional interlude have helped him confront the constraints of scale and budget on “The Little Prince.”

He describes the style of the settings as “simple, clean, open,” points out that legal restrictions prevented use of the original Saint-Exupery illustrations as his design sources (though there are, of course, inevitable similarities)--and feels that the opening plane-crash tableau is his “strongest, most individual contribution” to the ballet.

“We had a meeting,” he recalls “and Raiford (Rogers) said, ‘When the curtain goes up, there’s no dancing, just that plane, that smoke. It doesn’t last long, but that’s your scene .’ And it is.”

Far from being intimidated by the unmistakable ‘80s style and edge in Stock and Rodgers’ work, the “Little Prince” choreographers concede that, in Koenig’s words, “the look and the music are almost the unifying elements (of the production).”

“We knew we wanted ‘The Little Prince’ to be contemporary--not a rehash of a 19th-Century story ballet--and to do the whole thing as a ballet on pointe didn’t seem right. So it’s a balance between wanting a classical aesthetic and also bringing in other elements,” says Koenig, who dances the ballerina role of The Rose.

“I don’t think we’ve come up with a new movement form, but the overall approach--the spareness, the economy, the subtlety of expression--is what makes the ballet a very contemporary work.”

Divisions of choreographic responsibility among the four evidently caused no friction. “Raiford (Rogers) responded to elements in the story that Patrick (Frantz) and I didn’t,” Koenig reveals. And Frantz insists that not only did the collaboration stay ego-free (“It didn’t matter that this section was mine--it mattered that this was a good ‘Little Prince.’ ”), but that the interaction produced a unified result. In performance “nobody will know who choreographed which sequences,” he predicts.

“We all basically speak the same language--ballet as a codified technique,” explains Rogers. “And we felt that this kind of collaboration would work better than just assigning the choreography to one or two of us. Vicky (Koenig) and I grew so tired with the standard feudal system in ballet so, from the beginning, the philosophy of this company has been to bring artists, choreographers and dancers together.”

“Ballet has traditionally been autocratic--a one-choreographer system,” comments Koenig. “However, more of it is collaborative than is often credited. As a dancer, much of the work I’ve done with choreographers has been a process of creative give-and-take, an exchange of ideas. That’s what we’re doing in ‘The Little Prince.’ ”

Beyond devising a workable ballet scenario, and discovering pretexts for group dances in Saint-Exupery’s references to birds, echoes and a garden of roses, the greatest problem for the creative team seems to have been the gently satirical section of the book where the Little Prince travels through the cosmos meeting a king, a conceited man, a tippler, a businessman and a geographer. How the solution evolved represents, in microcosm, the whole collaborative process on the ballet.

Nobody wanted the sequence to become a conventional character divertissement --so the idea took shape (mostly through discussions between Koenig and Rogers) of having all the roles, and human follies, portrayed by the same person.

Enter choreographer Stanley Holden, longtime master of character dance at the Royal Ballet. And enter, too, Michael Marlin, a performer who defines these personae by juggling balls, a hat and other paraphernalia during the five-section, 12-minute scene.

For Holden, the assignment involved coveying his extraordinary character sense through juggling, a movement discipline that only a few beyond-the-mainstream (or off-the-wall) dance companies have used expressively.

“This was something entirely new for me,” Holden acknowledges. “We tried to get away from the vaudeville-type thing and stylize the juggling. I hoped it would add to the story. I didn’t want it to seem merely tricks.”

To work out the look and logistics of Marlin’s quick-change identities, Stock brainstormed with the choreographers (“I’d be drawing these sketches real fast and asking ‘Like this?,’ and they’d say ‘Yes, yes!’ ”). Less tractable, Rodgers rejected a suggestion that he compose a series of two-minute, “Nutcracker”-style numbers for the scene (“That would have been a disaster structurally”). Instead, he provided what he calls “a very large, passacaglia-type fantasia.”

As Holden’s rehearsals progressed, Frantz, Koenig and Rogers all were on hand to make sure that the scene would not only work on its own terms but would fit into the ballet as a whole. According to Holden, they also contributed “an odd movement here and there”--and he says he liked working that way: “I picked their brains, too, a little bit, if I felt it would enhance the section.”

“In the end I think we got the best of everything this way.”

“It was not like ‘you do your piece in one corner; I do mine in another,” Frantz emphasizes. “We worked together . I know that we all individually want to succeed but we decided to do ‘The Little Prince’ as a collaboration, and together we are much better than one.”