Ballet Comique de la Reine

• Choreography by Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx

• Context: French court spectacle for the wedding of Marguerite of Lorraine; widely considered the first “narrative ballet.”

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

In the Ballet Comique de la Reine, Foucault would not see the innocent birth of a new art form. He would see a performance of power, a ritual of state, where movement, music, and myth were orchestrated to regulate bodies and stage sovereignty. This “first ballet” must be understood not through aesthetics alone, but through the episteme of the Renaissance, where power and knowledge were fused within ceremonial displays.

This ballet is not only an entertainment—it is a technology of monarchy, a “spectacle of the Prince” encoded in mythological allegory, designed to reinforce the sovereign’s body as the pivot of cosmic and moral order. The performance aligns perfectly with what Foucault called a pastoral-political rationality, where discipline is masked by beauty, and where aesthetic order reflects political hierarchy.

In The Order of Things, Foucault described the Renaissance as an era where resemblance, order, and divine analogy structured knowledge. Ballet Comique operates in exactly this manner: it symbolically mimics cosmic harmony, aligning the monarch with Apollo and the Muses, not as abstract characters, but as inscriptions of political allegory. Dance here is not about expression, but about codification of obedience—movements that reflect the measured control of the court and the idealized body politic.

Moreover, through the lens of The History of Sexuality Vol. 2, we can interpret this performance as a site of subjectification—where bodies become legible, docile, and meaningful through public display. The noble participants, dressed in sumptuous costumes and trained in precise gesture, enact a pedagogical choreography. They are not “free artists” but regulated agents, internalizing a regime of visibility and self-discipline. Dance becomes a technology of the self, through which one becomes a noble subject—one who knows how to move, how to appear, how to be seen.

This aligns with Foucault’s conception of ethics as self-stylization under a regime of normativity. The “ethical substance” in this case is the courtier’s body, made legible and noble through discipline, order, and public spectacle. To dance in the court ballet is to construct oneself as a political subject, to internalize the spatial and temporal rhythms of power.

Furthermore, Foucault would situate this ballet within a broader genealogy of control—a transition from sovereign power (rooted in the visible body of the king) toward disciplinary regimes (rooted in the regulation of multiple bodies). The ballet, as spectacle, is the liminal form: a moment when the sovereign body inscribes itself on others, imposing order as a visible harmony, before the rise of more clandestine systems of surveillance and normalization.

Thus, Ballet Comique de la Reine is not the naive beginning of dance—it is a performative origin of the modern subject, the moment when the dancing body becomes an extension of power, of allegory, of the king's visible knowledge.

It is a dance of obedience, encoded in myth.