Petrushka

• Choreography by Michel Fokine

• Music by Igor Stravinsky

• Libretto by Alexandre Benois and Stravinsky
  Context: Set at a Shrovetide fair in St. Petersburg, the ballet follows Petrushka, a puppet imbued with human feelings, who is humiliated and killed by another puppet, only to rise as a ghostly presence in the final gesture.

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

Petrushka is not a ballet about movement—it is a ballet about interiority denied movement, subjectivity bound in wood and cloth, and aesthetic violence performed under the eyes of power. For Michel Foucault, this ballet would not read as mere allegory—it would read as a performative genealogy of the modern subject, trapped in mechanisms of control, visibility, and fatal recognition.

Petrushka is not a dancer. He is a figure of forced animation, a body that dances not out of freedom but compulsion. And yet—he suffers. He feels. He resists. This paradox is the site of modernity’s cruelest invention: the subject who is self-aware, yet without sovereignty.

Foucault, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, described subject formation as emerging not from autonomy but from practices of self within regimes of power. Petrushka is the grotesque parody of this: he is given feeling but not agency, desire but not fulfillment. He is constructed to amuse, yet haunted by pain. He is the tragic underside of Enlightenment man, the puppet whose strings are epistemological.

What is his sin? It is his difference. Petrushka is not beautiful like the Moor, nor docile like the Ballerina. He is irregular, asymmetric, staccato, and therefore grotesque. He becomes the visible deviation within the fairground’s regime of pleasure. The audience laughs, not because he is funny, but because his failure reassures their own aesthetic normalcy.

In this sense, Foucault would see Petrushka as a ballet of disciplinary performance. The puppet-theater functions as a panoptic dispositif: the entire square watches, judges, and responds. The crowd is not innocent. Their laughter is the laughter of surveillance, a collective inscription of normativity.

The puppet-master—an ambiguous, malevolent figure—is Foucault’s perfect emblem of biopolitical animation. He does not command through brute force but through technological artifice, granting life only to exploit it, giving subjectivity only to extract performance. This is power not as law, but as creative manipulation—the power to make, destroy, and humiliate.

And yet, in the final act, Petrushka breaks the circuit. After his death, he rises—not as revenge, but as echo, not as a restored body, but as residual presence. This ghostly gesture would fascinate Foucault. It is the trace that refuses to disappear, the subject who, though denied agency in life, haunts the apparatus that destroyed him.

This is not redemption—it is proof that power can never fully cleanse what it dehumanizes.

Stylistically, Petrushka also marks a Foucauldian rupture. Fokine’s choreography denies symmetrical grace, preferring jerky, angular, non-normative motion. Stravinsky’s score fragments continuity, alternating between dissonance, folk fragments, and rhythmic violence. This is not “beautiful” ballet. It is choreographic resistance, sound as breakdown, movement as malfunction.

Foucault would conclude: Petrushka is a ballet of subjection without redemption, where the subject is made visible only to be destroyed, where agency is a tragic illusion, and where the stage becomes a microcosm of disciplinary cruelty masquerading as entertainment.

It is not a dance.

It is a confession extracted through performance.