The Goldberg Variations

• Choreography: Jerome Robbins

• Music: J.S. Bach – Goldberg Variations

• Context: A large-scale, plotless ballet set to Bach’s complete Goldberg Variations, structured as a series of solos, duets, and group dances. Robbins’s choreography mixes ballet and modern idioms, moving between restraint and play, elegance and experimentation.

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

The Goldberg Variations is often seen as Robbins’s most ambitious philosophical ballet—a luminous exploration of form, variation, and style without narrative center. Through Foucault’s lens, this is not merely aesthetic experimentation—it is a choreography of epistemic dispersion, where subjectivity is decomposed into gestures, and the stage becomes a living archive of possible selves.

Bach’s music is itself structured around an Aria and 30 Variations, a format that suggests repetition without return. Foucault would understand this as a performance of difference within constraint—a principle that mirrors his own archaeological method: to excavate not the origin, but the discontinuities, the non-linear shifts that structure knowledge, identity, and art.

Robbins’s choreography does not illustrate the music. It converses with it, staging a series of dancerly “entries” into the score. These are not characters—they are bodily responses, variations of motion, differences internal to the same. There is no “truth” of the dance, no singular subject to follow. Instead, we witness a field of distributed bodies, each enacting a gestural modulation of the same underlying form.

This aligns with Foucault’s notion of the disappearance of the author. Robbins does not offer a thesis about the music or a statement about humanity. He allows the structure itself—Bach’s formality, the dancers’ disciplined training, the stage’s geometries—to produce a choreography without confession, a multiplicity without center.

Moreover, the ballet’s refusal of narrative is crucial. As Foucault emphasized, modernity displaces the sovereign subject and replaces it with networks of discourse, procedures, and operations. In The Goldberg Variations, there is no storyline, no psychological interior, no teleology. There is only structure in flux, subjectivities in motion, a choreography of coexistence.

The dancers appear in various permutations—soloists, couples, ensembles—but none dominate. The ballet resists climax, and its only return is at the very end, when the Aria is restated. Yet this return is not resolution. It is echo, afterimage, resonance. Foucault would note that this final moment functions like the trace—not a conclusion, but a reminder that all systems of meaning are contingent, structured by what repeats and what differs.

Importantly, Robbins draws from both classical ballet and modern dance. This hybridity reflects the genealogical layering of technique. Every tendu, port de bras, or tilt of the torso is not just a gesture—it is a reference, a citation of embodied histories. The body becomes a palimpsest, revealing the historical sedimentation of aesthetics within the act of motion.

Foucault’s notion of the archive is operative here—not as a place of storage, but as a dynamic system of knowledge production. The Goldberg Variations performs the archive through dance: it unfolds not as preservation, but as variation-without-origin, meaning-without-authority, subjectivity-without-essence.

Thus, The Goldberg Variations is not simply formalism. It is a critical machine, a philosophical work that deconstructs the very premise of artistic interiority by dispersing the subject into a grid of movement, relation, and recurrence.

It is not a story.

It is a topological meditation on difference, danced across the architectures of tradition.