Diversion of Angels

• Choreography: Martha Graham

• Music: Norman Dello Joio

• Context: A lyrical, non-narrative modern dance work, presenting three aspects or archetypes of love: adolescent (yellow), passionate (red), and mature (white). The movement language is emotional, architectural, and highly stylized in Graham’s signature technique.

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

From a Foucauldian standpoint, Diversion of Angels is not merely an aesthetic meditation on love—it is a disciplinary taxonomy of affect, where emotional states are not expressed but produced, coded, and made legible through a rigorous movement system. This ballet is not about love—it is about the regulation and formalization of emotional visibility.

The three women—coded by color and movement quality—are not individuals. They are types, discursive clusters, archetypes structured through choreography. Foucault, especially in The Order of Things, was deeply concerned with how knowledge is organized through classification, particularly of human attributes like madness, sexuality, and emotion. In Graham’s work, love is a field to be dissected—its modes separated, indexed, and choreographically rendered.

Each archetype’s movement style reflects a kind of emotional governance:

• The yellow figure (Adolescent Love) skips, flutters, and lunges in light, upward phrases. This is love-as-naïveté, encoded as epistemological innocence.

• The red figure (Passionate Love) twists, falls, and rises in sinuous, expansive spirals. This is love-as-excess, rendered through Dionysian corporeality, but domesticated by aesthetic formalism.

• The white figure (Mature Love) glides in centered, architectural arcs with a partner. This is love-as-virtue, choreographed as measured balance, emotional sovereignty, and symbolic closure.

Foucault would be less interested in the emotional symbolism than in how the emotional is converted into somatic language, how feeling is disciplined into gesture. Graham does not depict love—she teaches it through bodily inscription. The female dancers do not confess their desires; they instantiate emotion as epistemic form.

The male partners are present, but functionally secondary. Foucault would note their role as support structures, not psychological agents. The men facilitate the transmission of emotional identity, not as lovers but as apparatuses of movement confirmation. This reveals a deeper logic: the woman is the site of emotional production, while the man becomes the infrastructure of emotional legibility.

Importantly, Diversion of Angels presents love not as choice or rupture but as a continuum of modulated positions, echoing Foucault’s broader thesis that subjectivity is not fixed, but formed through variable, historical practices. In this way, Graham’s ballet becomes a moving archive of how the female emotional body is classified, aestheticized, and disciplined.

And yet, there is no tragedy, no violence, no breakdown. This is where Foucault might insert a subtle critique: the ballet euphemizes love by rendering its volatility into clean typologies. What of jealousy? Repression? Rage? Diversion of Angels offers no space for love’s messiness. Its choreography functions as a sanitizing grid, a visual economy where every passion is framed, abstracted, and contained.

Foucault would therefore interpret Diversion of Angels not as a hymn to love, but as a soft diagram of affective discipline. It is a ballet where emotion becomes pedagogy, where the body becomes archive, and where the self is formed through gestural taxonomies rather than narrative confession.

It is not about love.

It is about the government of feeling through choreographic form.