Sutra

• Choreography: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

• Collaboration: Shaolin monks, sculpture by Antony Gormley

• Context: A contemporary dance work involving monks from the Shaolin Temple. Blending martial arts, contemporary movement, Zen philosophy, and physical theater, it explores identity, discipline, ritual, and intercultural embodiment.

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

Sutra is a body of contradictions: Eastern and Western, ritual and performance, discipline and freedom. Through Foucault’s lens, it becomes not a mere fusion of cultures, but a spatial choreography of intersecting biopolitical regimes. It is a work that performs the architecture of bodily knowledge, enacting an archaeology of subjectivity across epistemic systems.

The dancers—Shaolin monks trained in ancient martial disciplines—do not dance in the Western sense. They demonstrate, ritualize, transmit. Their bodies are inscribed with centuries of institutionalized movement knowledge, the kind Foucault described in Discipline and Punish: a form of docile body production wherein power and virtue are interlaced.

But Cherkaoui’s intervention is not ethnographic. He doesn’t stage the monks as “authentic bodies” in contrast to contemporary dance; instead, he choreographs their proximity to himself, a Belgian-Moroccan choreographer shaped by European modernism. This proximity creates a space of epistemological friction, where ritualized identity meets postmodern discontinuity.

The modular wooden boxes, designed by Antony Gormley, become the ballet’s central dispositif. Foucault would immediately recognize these boxes not as props, but as material expressions of spatial control and transformation. They are temples, cages, coffins, mirrors. The dancers enter, reconfigure, stack, and collapse them. This is not choreography of movement alone—it is a choreography of architectural knowledge, a genealogy of how space disciplines the body and constructs meaning.

Foucault would interpret Sutra as an inquiry into technologies of the self. The Shaolin monks’ martial rituals are embodied ethical practices—what Foucault, in The Use of Pleasure, identified as care of the self through repeated bodily discipline. These practices are not performative; they are constitutive. The monks do not represent—they are. But through their insertion into a contemporary Western art framework, their practices become visible as aesthetic constructs, and thus subject to re-signification.

This is not merely exoticism—it is a genealogical encounter. Cherkaoui’s presence onstage signals the impossibility of pure observation. His movements, softer and fluid, contrast the monks’ taut physicality. This juxtaposition performs what Foucault would call heterotopic juxtaposition: the collision of incommensurable epistemes, neither of which is fully centered or subordinated.

The silence of the monks is critical. They do not speak, but they enact. Their authority comes not from discourse but from bodily repetition. For Foucault, this is a counter-model to Western regimes of confession. The monk’s body is not made to tell the truth through speech—it becomes truth through ritualized form. Their movement is inscription, not communication.

And yet, Cherkaoui, by integrating his contemporary choreography, stages a subtle resistance—not to the monks, but to the fixity of tradition. The work becomes a performance of translation, not in linguistic terms, but in somatic terms. Foucault would likely view Sutra as a ritual of cross-cultural subjectivation, where identity is not given, but produced through choreographic negotiation.

Thus, Sutra is not a meeting of East and West—it is a living choreography of epistemic tension, a genealogy of form where bodies are shaped not by nature or culture, but by technologies of discipline, aesthetics, and belief.

It is not simply intercultural art.

It is a postmodern temple, where ritual and modernity clash, cohabit, and inscribe each other—silently.