Swan Lake

• Choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov

• Music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• Context: Canonical 19th-century ballet; features the tale of Odette (the White Swan) and Odile (the Black Swan), dual embodiments of innocence and seduction, performed traditionally by the same ballerina. The ballet dramatizes love, betrayal, transformation, and tragic transcendence.

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

Swan Lake is perhaps the most iconic example of what Foucault might term a disciplinary myth of femininity—an allegorical construction of gendered behavior, purity, and punishment staged with the full force of imperial aesthetics. While the ballet appears to deal in fantasy—swans, curses, enchantment—it is in fact a densely coded moral technology, deploying binary categories (pure/impure, white/black, loyal/seductress) to regulate desire, power, and the body.

The duality of Odette and Odile—traditionally danced by the same performer—is a performance of subject-splitting. Foucault, in The History of Sexuality and Ethics, would read this not merely as a theatrical device but as the dramatization of a disciplinary regime that insists on separating bodies according to moral legibility. The White Swan is obedience, chastity, the natural body in mourning. The Black Swan is erotic excess, manipulation, theatricalized desire. The ballerina's body must perform both—embody both extremes, while being punished for each.

This double coding is deeply Foucauldian: the female subject is constituted not through one identity but through a grid of oppositions, each surveilled and judged. The tragedy of Swan Lake is not fate—it is a structure of intelligibility that gives no space to ambiguity. The feminine subject must either die pure or live corrupted. She cannot be both.

Moreover, the prince, Siegfried, is not the sovereign hero of old court ballets. He is a regulated subject within his own class structure, forced into a system of arranged marriage, public duty, and visual deception. His failure to distinguish Odette from Odile is not merely a plot twist—it is a failure of knowledge, of epistemic discernment, a rupture in what Foucault calls “the regime of truth.” The tragedy results not from betrayal, but from misrecognition—a failure of the apparatus that is supposed to know and control female bodies.

The swan transformation itself is a kind of biopolitical fantasy: it renders the woman both animal and human, erotic and endangered, expressive and mute. Foucault would frame this as an ontological destabilization of the female body, which must either be contained in the flock (submissive nature) or killed (in the finale) to restore social order. The wings are not freedom—they are marks of exceptionality, symbols of both vulnerability and erotic spectacle.

Also notable is how the entire ballet is a ritual of hyper-regulated aesthetics. Classical ballet technique, pointework, corps de ballet symmetry—all function as an apparatus of bodily normalization. The female dancers are not individuals; they are modules of motion, interchangeable surfaces of grace, reinforcing what Foucault would call the “anatomo-politics of ballet.” They must conform to the discipline of the stage in order to exist within the form.

In this sense, Swan Lake does not just represent ideology—it produces it choreographically. It renders legible the morality of the feminine through muscular control, technical mastery, and sacrifice. The final apotheosis—Odette and Siegfried leaping into the lake together—functions as aesthetic martyrdom, a scene of symbolic purification through death. The subject escapes only by vanishing.

Foucault might say: here, the sovereign command has faded, but disciplinary beauty has triumphed. There is no king—but there is still punishment, performance, and the endless reproduction of idealized bodies.