La Bayadère

• Choreography by Marius Petipa

• Music by Ludwig Minkus

• Context: Set in a fantastical version of India, La Bayadère tells the story of Nikiya, a temple dancer betrayed and murdered, who returns in a dreamlike sequence called The Kingdom of the Shades. It is one of the most iconic Romantic ballets still performed in the classical canon.

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

La Bayadère offers one of the most revealing sites in the Western canon of what Foucault might describe as the aesthetic logic of colonial fantasy, in which the body of the “Other”—racialized, eroticized, and ultimately spiritualized—is produced as both object of desire and site of erasure. It is not merely ballet-as-fantasy—it is ballet as epistemological Orientalism, where movement becomes a medium for staging imperial desire and moral closure.

Foucault’s Order of Things helps us situate the ballet within the 19th-century episteme of classification, exotic display, and ethnographic simulation. The setting—a fantasy “India” populated by bayadères (temple dancers), rajahs, and golden idols—has nothing to do with cultural accuracy. It is a Western apparatus of representation, in which the East is rendered as a space of ungoverned sensuality, fatal passion, and ghostly moral redemption.

Nikiya, the bayadère herself, is the ideal example of what Foucault in The Use of Pleasure called the moralized body: she is at once sexualized and sanctified, objectified and ennobled. She belongs to no domestic structure; her function is to serve—first to the temple, then to the male gaze, then as a symbol of tragic femininity. Her erotic capital is precisely what makes her disposable.

Her death—poisoned by a rival, betrayed by the prince—is not merely a plot twist. It is a disciplinary act. Her desire must be punished. Her transgression (loving the prince, defying her spiritual station) must be resolved not through justice, but through spectacle. Thus enters The Kingdom of the Shades.

This iconic scene—dozens of ballerinas in white tutus descending a ramp in perfect unison—is not just a visual triumph. It is, for Foucault, a moment of ontological purification: a ballet of dead women, cleansed of sexual agency, now rendered pure form, pure aesthetic, pure obedience. These “shades” are white, weightless, and nameless. Their movements are choreographed into perfect sameness—not individuality but seriality, not freedom but ghostly conformity.

This is not simply beautiful. It is the ballet’s moral project laid bare: desire is punished, difference is erased, and the feminine body is allowed to return only as disciplined abstraction.

Furthermore, La Bayadère reinforces a global order of visual consumption. The colonial backdrop is not questioned—it is fetishized. The entire structure of the ballet invites the (Western) audience to gaze safely upon a stylized, eroticized East, devoid of agency, turned into a stage of moral lessons and aesthetic release. This is what Foucault would call a “regime of truth”—the exotic becomes a code by which the West narrates its own virtue.

And in terms of subject formation, the ballet teaches its female dancers—especially those in the Shades sequence—to become interchangeable symbols of repentance, rather than agents of resistance. The body is trained not for expression, but for graceful submission, aestheticized loss, and corporeal silence.

In sum, La Bayadère is a myth of sacralized eroticism, whose central fantasy is not escape, but containment. It stages the Other only so that the West can learn how to feel—guiltlessly, beautifully, colonially.