Activating minor pedagogy in an adaptation and staging of The Little Prince

ABSTRACT

In 2016, I adapted and directed a chamber theatre production of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince at Augusta University. The experience was new for my students and our audience, who are accustomed to Augusta University theatre directors producing plays that largely draw on representational practices in a realistic mode. Inspired by Robert Breen’s chamber theatre as reinvigorated by Michael Bowman, my adaptation and staging applied what Bertolt Brecht refers to as Minor Pedagogy to integrate presentational techniques into the theatre program at Augusta University. The discussion is relevant to many performance studies scholars and practitioners, particularly those navigating careers in conventional theatre and communication programs at small institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Minor pedagogy
• chamber theatre
• novelization
• stylization
• epic theatre

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Ruth Laurion Bowman for her thoughtful review of the production and incredible advice during the writing process, Craig Gingrich Philbrook and the anonymous reviewers of TPQ for their valuable feedback, and to my family for their steadfast support and inspiration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Wright 12–13 and Patterson 284.

2 See M. Bowman’s section “Bakhtin’s ‘Novel’” 11–14 for a comprehensive discussion of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel.

3 Other scholars and practitioners have heeded Bowman’s call for the revision of chamber theatre as well. For example, in her essay, “Toward a Feminist Chamber Theatre Method,” Lara E. Dieckmann retools Breen’s basic chamber theatre conventions within a feminist framework, and Heidi Rose draws on Bowman to discuss how The Arden, a professional theatre company, novelized chamber theatre to adapt and stage Brian Freil’s Lovers for a conventional theatre audience.

4 For a list of adaptations of The Little Prince, see Wikipedia’s “List of The Little Prince Adaptations.”

5 Breen discusses the difficulty that some actors have with “simultaneous speech” and attributes it to the conventional theatre’s “low tolerance for two people speaking at once” (76).

6 Saint-Exupéry penned the drawings himself, which are said to have initiated his process of writing the novella (Popova). Adèle Breaux, who was Saint-Exupéry’s “teacher of English” while he was living in Long Island and writing The Little Prince, writes a lovely account of the wastebasket full of Saint-Exupéry’s “‘rejected drawings’” and his offer to take as many as she liked (15, 76).

7 According to Pitches, Meyerhold also “brought paintings into the rehearsal room as a stimulus” for creating the “look” of his productions (14).