By Lauren Earline Leonard
Throughout its 20th anniversary season BalletX has honored its history and looked to the future by delighting audiences with pairings of its most iconic works and new commissions. Closing the season, the highly-anticipated return of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s critically-acclaimed, The Little Prince, July 15-19 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre.
The ballet is adapted from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved tale of a pilot (the Narrator) and a little boy (the Little Prince) whose travels and travails explore themes of friendship, love, loneliness, imagination, and what it is to grow up. It is a story that resonates across generations and cultures revealing itself differently with time and age. When approached by BalletX to create a new work in 2019, Ochoa chose The Little Prince because of this familiarity and broad appeal.
In the years since The Little Prince debuted in Philadelphia, Ochoa has become one of ballet’s most prolific and sought-after choreographers—she is booked for the next two years—creating narrative ballets about historical figures including Frida Kahlo, Coco Chanel, Eva Perón, and Anne Lister for companies around the world. No matter the company or character, Ochoa advances the plot and communicates the story using the “universal language” of gesture and movement. Bringing nuanced narratives to the stage inspires curiosity in Ochoa, “I like the problem. I like the challenge.”
Working with BalletX, Ochoa was able to lean into the physicality of the challenge. “BalletX dancers don’t have the mentality of classical dancers where the aesthetic of the perfect line comes first, they go for the energy of a movement…they really push it further,” she says. Ochoa believes that revisitation and revision improve a work but scheduling conflicts prevented her from restaging the production with the current company. “I always make amendments to the piece…new dancers give something else. I believe if Balanchine were still alive, he’d still be tinkering with pieces,” she tells me. The “complete faith” she has in the production team at BalletX provided comfort in her remove from the production. Save for some recast characters—the Snake will be performed by a female dancer—and redesigned costumes for the planets and the fox, the 2026 version remains true to the original.
Ochoa’s frequent collaborator, composer Peter Salem, will return to Philadelphia to play his score live during the full run of the show. Of Salem, Ochoa says, “We have an artistic love story. There’s a lot of trust, a lot of regard and respect for each other. And playfulness.”
Salem is known for his compositions for film and TV (the BBC’s hit series Call the Midwife; the documentaries, Franceso’s Venice, and The Power of Art), but his history with dance goes back to his early days as a musician playing live for classes at London Contemporary Dance to make money. (His mother and sister were both in the world of dance; his sister is a collaborator.) Salem, Ochoa, and their frequent directorial partner, Nancy Meckler, connected by chance in 2012. The result was their first collaboration, A Streetcar Named Desire for the Scottish Ballet. Now years into the collaborative partnership, Salem refers to Ochoa as “brilliant,” and is able to anticipate her choreographic “edge.” They’ve established a bit of a working shorthand: if Ochoa responds to a musical mockup with a “nice emoji,” Salem knows he’s on the right track.
In a narrative ballet where text is lacking, Salem believes his task as composer is to support and clarify the storytelling by “giving the main protagonist a voice through sound…the music must connect the dancers to the essence of the story and with the feelings of imagination, wonder, hope, danger, urgency.” The eponymous prince, for instance, is heard as the clean, simple sound of the banjo. (Salem says guitar was “too polite, too sophisticated.”) The Rose, described by Salem as “a bit of a prima donna, a bit of a narcissist,” is the violin.
Salem’s compositions for dance are usually delivered in final form prior to the start of rehearsals, though he relishes the opportunity to embrace the “organic function” of creating music for dance as he did in studio with BalletX and Ochoa in 2019. As ideated by Christine Cox, he composed an additional scene where the Pilot finds water and further developed the role of the Fox. The music for the 2026 production will sound the same to audiences as it did in 2019.
Salem’s wish for a future production is to add a prologue informed by his extensive research of de Saint-Exupéry through two of his other books, Wind, Sand, and Stars and Night Flight which provide further evidence of the autobiographical elements of The Little Prince as inspired by the author’s own nighttime flights to deliver mail to remote places. Salem’s musical exposition would reveal that it was an argument with his wife, Consuelo (the Rose) that began the Pilot’s journey. He would emphasize the Lamplighter’s logistical and metaphorical importance: “when you’re flying solo, you look for the light.”
The Little Prince endures for Ochoa, Salem, and audiences because its themes resonate across culture, generations, and life stages. Appropriate then for BalletX’s monumental 20th season to close with an invitation to consider the foxes, roses, lamplighters, pilots, and little princes in our own lives.
