Les Sylphides

• Choreography: Michel Fokine

• Music: Frédéric Chopin, orchestrated by Alexander Glazunov

• Context: A short, plotless ballet in “white ballet” style. It features a poet surrounded by sylphs—ethereal female spirits—in a moonlit, dreamlike landscape. Revered for its abstract purity and nostalgic romanticism.

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

On the surface, Les Sylphides seems apolitical—an “abstract ballet” without narrative, conflict, or tragedy. But for Foucault, this abstraction is not a void. It is an aesthetic regime. It reveals not the absence of power, but its sublimation into poetics, into ghostly form and soft control.

The “sylphs” of Les Sylphides are not characters. They are traces, specters, disembodied ideals. In their pale costumes and soft pointework, they evoke a Romantic femininity that is aestheticized to the point of disappearance. Foucault, always attuned to how power operates through idealization, would immediately recognize that these sylphs are not free spirits—they are disciplined figures of transcendence, graceful erasures of agency, designed to be witnessed, not heard.

There is no story here—but that is the point. Les Sylphides performs the evacuation of narrative subjectivity, especially feminine subjectivity, and replaces it with poetic atmosphere. It is a ballet of suspended time, where transformation, desire, and resistance are all neutralized in favor of eternal beauty. Foucault would argue this marks the pinnacle of ballet’s bio-political project: the training of bodies not to act, but to signify presence itself—to hover, to haunt, to perform softness.

The lone male figure, the Poet, is also not a protagonist in the narrative sense. He becomes a center of aesthetic gravity, the one around whom these sylphs orbit like melancholic satellites. This gender dynamic isn’t incidental—it reflects a deep structural asymmetry: male subjectivity is still legible (he gazes, receives, reflects), while female presence is ghosted, aestheticized into silence.

Foucault’s work in The Use of Pleasure and Ethics speaks of how individuals become subjects through practices of self-regulation. Here, the sylphs exemplify this through discipline so internalized it becomes imperceptible. Their stillness, their repetitive arabesques, their balanced extensions are not “natural”—they are technologies of the self, produced through thousands of hours of training in order to perform perfect poetic stillness. They do not speak; they float.

But perhaps most radically, Les Sylphides abstracts mourning. This ballet is not about action—it is about loss. Loss of narrative, loss of agency, loss of corporeality. Foucault would not read this as decadence but as a kind of elegiac governance: the ballet becomes a ritual of ghostly regulation, where beauty is maintained by refusing change, by aestheticizing death into dance.

There is no climax, no resolution. The sylphs enter, dance, and fade. This structure reflects what Foucault would call a disciplinary temporality: Les Sylphides doesn’t evolve—it repeats. It teaches the audience to value restraint, lightness, and melancholic detachment as virtues. It is not freedom—it is the choreography of refusal.

In the end, Les Sylphides is not a void—it is a soft panopticon, in which bodies are made weightless not through liberation, but through the complete absorption of aesthetic law into ghostly form.

This is disciplinary beauty spiritualized. Not to escape power, but to perform its fading traces.