The Green Table

• Choreography: Kurt Jooss

• Music: Fritz A. Cohen

• Context: A powerful anti-war ballet created between the World Wars. The dance opens and closes with diplomats gesturing meaninglessly around a green table. In between, personifications of death, soldiers, civilians, and suffering bodies dramatize the consequences of their decisions.

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

In The Green Table, Foucault would not see a didactic anti-war ballet. He would see a genealogy of political indifference, a ritualized anatomy of how death is managed, normalized, and aestheticized by institutions that sit far from the battlefield. This ballet is not just a protest—it is a precise choreographic cartography of biopower, staging the interface between policy, death, and the body.

From The History of Sexuality, Foucault defines biopolitics as the mode of modern governance concerned with administering life and death, not through sovereign decree, but through policy, procedure, and systemic rationalization. The Green Table begins and ends with a scene that visually embodies this: eight diplomats at a table, in grotesquely repetitive gestures, pontificating and posturing, while death plays out invisibly elsewhere.

The table, green and round, is not a neutral object—it is a disciplinary space, a surface where life is turned into abstract negotiation, where the body becomes a file, a number, a statistic. Foucault would read this space as a microcosm of modern institutions: the courtroom, the council chamber, the prison board. In each, the body is absent, replaced by language, procedure, and symbolic detachment.

But in the middle sections, Jooss introduces what Foucault would call the “bodies of the condemned”. Soldiers march in mechanical lockstep, lovers are separated, peasants flee, mothers mourn. These are not expressive characters—they are figures of consequence, bodies subjected to violence organized from elsewhere. Their suffering is not exceptional—it is the system working as intended.

Death, played by a skeletal figure in black, returns again and again, dancing the same angular, omnipresent pattern. He does not discriminate. He appears in every scene, every class, every setting. Death here is not fate, but policy—a consequence of systemic decisions. He is not random; he is structural.

Foucault would find the ballet’s use of repetition essential. Each scene begins and ends with the same diplomatic table. The diplomats’ gestures are rhythmic, ritualized, unchanged by the horror that follows. This is what Foucault called the neutrality of discourse—where language becomes a veil for violence, and where power maintains itself by appearing rational, disembodied, and procedural.

There are no heroes in The Green Table, no narrative redemption. The ballet ends where it began, suggesting that the structure is self-perpetuating, immune to humanism. This cyclical structure is not just theatrical—it reflects Foucault’s sense of the modern political condition: that wars are not deviations, but part of the apparatus of power, managed through knowledge, language, and administrative aesthetics.

From Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, we can also say that The Green Table denies the subject any heroic agency. The dancers are not individual agents—they are bodies produced by and submitted to a choreography of violence, one that flows from policy to street, from gesture to grave.

Thus, The Green Table becomes a visual archaeology of modern war—not as chaos, but as a system of calculated disposability, choreographed through gestures of order and ceremonial powerlessness.

It is not a lament.

It is a dossier with a pulse.