Artifact

• Choreography: William Forsythe

• Music: Bach + additional electronic/percussive interventions

• Context: A groundbreaking deconstruction of classical ballet by Forsythe. Artifact fragments the classical form, introduces spoken word, disrupts music-dance correspondence, and interrogates theatrical norms. It’s one of Forsythe’s most architectonic, self-reflexive works.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Artifact is not a dance. It is a choreographic event of epistemic rupture. In the hands of Foucault, it becomes a searing case study in how disciplinary structures implode, how aesthetic regimes turn back on themselves, and how the body, space, and knowledge are violently reconfigured.

This ballet stages not form, but the disintegration of form. The opening scenes involve lights abruptly snapping on and off. A woman in historical dress screams a nonsensical verbal refrain: “Step, step, step.” Dancers move with classical precision only to be fragmented, multiplied, mirrored, and interrupted. This is not abstraction—it is epistemological critique.

Foucault, particularly in The Order of Things and his lectures on space and the archive, would interpret Artifact as a performance of archaeological destabilization. Ballet’s historically constructed grammar—its port de bras, its épaulement, its frontality—are still present. But they are no longer signifiers of grace or harmony. They become traces, residues, artifacts in the archaeological sense: broken remains of a once-coherent system.

Forsythe’s choreography weaponizes these fragments against their own legacy. The dancers do not express—they inhabit algorithms. Their relationships are geometric, recursive, interrupted. Foucault would see this as the collapse of representation as a stabilizing discourse, replaced by pure operation, pure field.

The stage is no longer a framed space of illusion. It becomes a theatrical laboratory, a disciplinary chamber where the very act of seeing is questioned. The lights snap off, the structure collapses, time loops—what appears linear becomes recursive epistemic noise. Foucault would call this a heterotopia: a space that disturbs and displaces all others, producing critical estrangement rather than resolution.

The use of spoken word—a woman repeating words, cutting off the dancers, shouting interruptions—introduces what Foucault might term the return of the repressed archive. These words do not explain—they fracture, reminding the viewer that behind every aesthetic system lies an infrastructure of power, pedagogy, and control.

Crucially, Artifact does not abandon ballet’s technical grammar—it hyper-aestheticizes it, turning movement into evidence of historicity, not of timelessness. The dancer is no longer a subject of grace, but a historical agent inscribed with the failures of modernity. The body is not neutral—it is choreographed by disciplinary systems, and now rendered absurd through overuse, decontextualization, and rhythmic violence.

Foucault would be especially interested in how Artifact displaces authorship. It does not affirm Forsythe as a choreographic “genius.” Instead, it displays the choreographer as architect, as meta-discursive agent, one who configures the spatial-temporal logics of how movement is seen and known. The dance becomes a dispositif, a machine for reorganizing perception.

The audience, too, is implicated. They are made uncomfortable, subjected to vision's collapse, to sound without meaning, to bodies that dance and refuse to be legible. This is not Brechtian alienation—it is disciplinary estrangement, a refusal of catharsis, a staging of aesthetic collapse.

Thus, Artifact is not a ballet.

It is a deconstructive act of choreographic archaeology, a performance where classical technique becomes ruin, where the stage becomes an archive of its own undoing, and where movement itself becomes a critique of aesthetic epistemology.