Clytemnestra

• Choreography: Martha Graham

• Music: Halim El-Dabh

• Context: One of Martha Graham’s largest and most ambitious works, Clytemnestra reinterprets the Greek tragedy of the queen who murders her husband, Agamemnon, upon his return from the Trojan War. It is a meditation on justice, memory, vengeance, and feminine power.

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

Clytemnestra is not merely a retelling of myth—it is a corporeal excavation of the archive, a layered embodiment of historical trauma, gendered vengeance, and the philosophical impossibility of justice. For Michel Foucault, this work would not be classified as “expressionist dance” but as genealogical choreography: a movement-based mapping of the discontinuous, non-linear forces that produce subjectivity as wound, as testimony, and as verdict.

Graham’s Clytemnestra is not a character in the modern sense. She is a historical body, an ethical battleground, and above all, a speaking silence—a woman whose movement does not confess in words but in ritualized corporeal fragments, in angular grief, in cyclical revenge.

Foucault’s method, especially in The Order of Things and Ethics, is not to explain but to expose the strata of discontinuity beneath the illusion of unity. In Graham’s ballet, Clytemnestra is not presented as a consistent self but as a palimpsest of memories—wife, queen, mother, murderer, victim. Each role emerges through movement like a flare of buried knowledge, briefly visible before sinking back into embodied memory.

The work is structured around flashbacks, dreams, and interrogations. This is not storytelling—it is archaeology. Foucault would observe that Clytemnestra’s body functions like a material archive, one that resists linear redemption. Her dances are rituals of remembering, not to find truth but to feel the force of events that have no closure.

Her power is not heroic—it is a consequence. She does not act from autonomy but from inscription, from the trauma of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, from the codes of familial vengeance. Foucault would say: she is not free, but she is not determined either. She exists in a space of historical pressure, where subjectivity is formed through violence made legible on the body.

The set design—fragmented Greco-architectural forms—reinforces this. It is not a palace; it is a ruined tribunal, a temporal collapse where the present, past, and mythic intertwine. The stage is not a space of clarity but of ruins, and it is within these ruins that Clytemnestra dances her trial.

Foucault’s reflections on confession and the body are particularly relevant here. In The Use of Pleasure, he speaks of how the body is made to speak without language, how it becomes a site where truth is extracted through form, not through words. Graham’s Clytemnestra is exactly this: she performs not guilt, but testimony. She does not seek forgiveness—she seeks witness.

The choreography refuses eroticization. There is no pleasure in her movements. Her body is contorted, weighted, collapsing, piercing. This is not Dionysian excess; it is the poetics of culpability, where every reach and recoil becomes an act of archival remembrance. Her solo after Agamemnon’s return is not exultation but execution—a movement of justice that understands itself to be tainted, tragic, and necessary.

What Foucault might find most radical is that Clytemnestra never resolves. There is no final verdict, no moral victory. Even when she is condemned, her figure haunts the stage. Like a Foucauldian subject, she never disappears—she becomes a residue of history, a remainder that the discourse of justice cannot fully contain.

Thus, Clytemnestra is not about myth.

It is a genealogical anatomy of vengeance, gender, and memory, staged in a body that has become its own archive.