Fancy Free

• Choreography: Jerome Robbins

• Music: Leonard Bernstein

• Context: A light-hearted ballet about three American sailors on shore leave in New York City during World War II. It features humorous competitions, flirtation with women, and a jazzy, modern dance vocabulary. It later became the foundation for On the Town.

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

On the surface, Fancy Free is buoyant and energetic—a celebration of youthful exuberance, urban mobility, and romantic possibility in wartime America. But for Foucault, beneath its syncopated charm lies a disciplinary diagram of masculinity, sexuality, and wartime normalcy, performed with cheerful compliance and erotic containment.

At its core, Fancy Free is about performance under constraint. These sailors are not free—they are on state-sanctioned leave, their “freedom” carefully circumscribed by military protocol, civic visibility, and gender roles. Their every move in the ballet—athletic, flirtatious, theatrical—is choreographed to affirm their role within a national apparatus of masculine productivity.

Foucault, particularly in The History of Sexuality and Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, would recognize this work as a technology of the self, where men are invited to experience and perform pleasure, but only within carefully coded gestures. The flirtation, the bravado, the competition over women—these are not expressions of desire, but rituals of masculine reinforcement, designed to keep pleasure within heteronormative, militarized boundaries.

The women in the ballet are objectified but elusive. They exist not as subjects, but as triggers of masculine differentiation. The sailors don’t fall in love—they compete, they pose, they display. This is not courtship—it is choreographic calibration: a rehearsal of how young men should behave under modern surveillance of both state and society.

Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power is key here. These bodies are not only trained (militarily), but also aestheticized for public consumption. The dance vocabulary—a hybrid of ballet, jazz, and street movement—is not free-form; it is controlled improvisation, designed to convey the illusion of spontaneity while tightly conforming to the aesthetics of American optimism.

And the setting? New York City in wartime. The urban environment is not just a backdrop—it is a disciplinary field. The bar, the lamppost, the sidewalk: each location marks a spatial regulation of desire, telling the viewer where and how bodies may flirt, move, and express. The public square becomes a theater of moral legibility, where masculine energy is visible but never truly transgressive.

Moreover, the entire premise of the ballet—that these men will soon return to war—functions as an ethical tether. Their pleasure is temporary, their exuberance suspended in the awareness of coming violence. This is disciplinary joy, tolerated because it is framed as fleeting, innocent, and patriotic.

Foucault would also attend to what is absent: the figure of the “other” man. There is no space here for queerness, for male intimacy outside homosocial competitiveness. The physical proximity of the sailors, their synchronized movements, their theatrical camaraderie—these are all containments of male touch, not invitations. Queerness, though latent in the stylization of gesture, is precluded by narrative structure.

Thus, Fancy Free becomes a case study in how pleasure is permitted, performed, and policed. It is not a rupture but a regulation. Its joy is encoded, its masculinity calibrated, its sexuality suspended between play and protocol.

It is the dance of freedom under watch, where the body performs itself as both citizen and spectacle.