Lully’s Ballets de Cour

• Music & choreography by Jean-Baptiste Lully

• Context: Performed at the court of Louis XIV; foundational to French Baroque ballet and tied to the political aesthetics of absolutism.

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

In the evolution from the Ballet Comique de la Reine to the Ballets de Cour of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Foucault would detect a solidification of the dance-body as a governed subject, molded not only by aesthetic rules but by the disciplinary architecture of absolutist power. With Lully, dance becomes an apparatus of state governance, not merely in symbol, but in technique, codification, and pedagogy.

This is the era of the King’s body as performance. And no one understood this more than Louis XIV, who danced the role of Apollo himself in Le Ballet de la Nuit. In Foucault’s terms, this represents a transformation of monarchical spectacle into disciplinary regularity: the king not only stands for the sun but orchestrates the very temporal rhythm of the state, enforcing a regime of physical time and space through dance notation, rehearsal, and visual display.

From The Order of Things, Foucault's theory of representation is clear: knowledge during the Classical Age became increasingly ordered by identity, classification, and visibility. Ballets de Cour exemplify this. They establish a grid of regulated gestures, a taxonomy of movement in which the dancing body is inscribed within a rational and hierarchically organized system. It is not improvisational—it is architectural.

Foucault would particularly focus on how the body becomes a text, a readable and writable surface. The positions, attitudes, and rules of Baroque ballet are part of what he would later identify as the "anatomo-politics" of the body—a disciplining of limbs, gestures, glances, postures. Lully’s ballets, through the Académie Royale de Danse, were not just shows; they were laboratories of normativity.

But these ballets did not only shape bodily behavior—they shaped subjectivity. Drawing from The Use of Pleasure, Foucault might frame Baroque ballet as a technē tou biou, a technique of living, in which courtly dancers came to know themselves through conduct, visibility, and graceful submission to power. The courtier-dancer’s identity was constructed through self-surveillance and aesthetic obedience. Their movements were not merely performed; they were interiorized.

In ethical terms, these performances reflect the formation of a courtly ethos, where virtue is no longer measured in religious asceticism but in corporeal elegance, measured comportment, and regulated affect. The self becomes ethical not by withdrawing from the world, but by offering itself as a visible surface of harmony—a principle central to Foucault’s notion of subjectivity.

Moreover, Lully’s ballet constructs gendered performances of power. Foucault would analyze how masculinity is disciplined into verticality, symmetry, and command, while femininity is associated with grace, curvature, and submissive lightness. Thus, ballet is not merely performance—it is a repeated inscription of the sexual order of absolutist France.

Finally, the Ballets de Cour represent a key moment in the shift from spectacle to surveillance. While still public and ceremonious, these ballets also anticipate the training of bodies behind the scenes, through rigorous practice, correction, and notation—a kind of proto-Panopticism applied to aesthetic labor.

Thus, in Lully’s ballet, Foucault would hear not just music, but the rhythmic pulse of disciplinary power. He would see not just beauty, but a visual regime in which the subject is both produced and contained.

The ballet is the mirror of the king—but also the blueprint for the modern self.