The Nutcracker

• Choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov

• Music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• Context: Based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale, the ballet features a young girl’s journey through dream worlds after receiving a magical nutcracker for Christmas. It has become a global holiday tradition, especially in the U.S.

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

The Nutcracker, in its most widespread 20th- and 21st-century forms, is not just a holiday ballet. It is what Michel Foucault would recognize as a seasonal ritual of bourgeois pedagogy, performed through the aesthetic regulation of children, gender roles, and cultural consumption. It stages not only a fantasy, but a fantasy of moral formation, colonial spectacle, and temporally programmed desire.

At its narrative core, The Nutcracker is about a girl named Clara (or Marie), a child on the cusp of adolescence, who receives a nutcracker doll—an object simultaneously of innocence, desire, and latent eroticization. Her journey into the Land of Sweets represents not rebellion, but a dreamscape in which normativity is both preserved and rehearsed.

Foucault, drawing from The Use of Pleasure, would frame this not as a liberation of childhood imagination, but as a training ground for future subjectivity. Clara does not become a heroine; she becomes an observer, a witness to the world’s structured delights. She is ushered through acts of pageantry, fantasy, and exoticized displays—each choreographed to induce wonder without subversion.

From The Order of Things, Foucault would point out how the ballet divides its world through visual classification and ethnographic fantasy. The second act becomes a parade of “character dances”: Spanish, Arabian, Chinese, Russian. These are not cultural dialogues—they are colonial tableaux, performed as digestible, ornamental otherness, wrapped in the sugar-coating of Tchaikovsky’s orchestration. The “Land of Sweets” becomes a taxonomy of pleasurable types, each assigned a flavor, a style, and a function, and presented without narrative depth.

In Foucauldian terms, this is not simply aesthetic. It is a regime of knowledge through performance: cultures turned into consumable stereotypes, organized under a European gaze, reinforcing a global order where difference is permitted only as spectacle, never as agency.

Meanwhile, the dance vocabulary itself enacts bodily discipline. Clara’s movements, like those of the children’s corps de ballet, are highly regulated, miniature reproductions of adult ballet technique. This isn’t “freedom”—it is rehearsal of docility. The children are not improvising; they are internalizing aesthetic order, quite literally dancing themselves into acceptability.

The Nutcracker thus becomes a seasonal engine of normalization. It teaches children to watch, participate, but not disturb; to enjoy fantasy only in the approved frames; to associate joy with decorum, gender separation, and reward through gift economy. It is no accident that The Nutcracker became a capitalist ritual in America—it aligns perfectly with the repetition of desire without excess, consumption without critique, fantasy without politics.

In Clara’s journey, Foucault would locate the functioning of what he called pastoral power—a form of authority that cares for its subject by guiding them gently into the structures of normativity. Drosselmeyer, the magician-godfather, is not just a plot device—he is an allegory for the pedagogical apparatus, offering Clara entry into the world of controlled enchantment.

Finally, we must consider the frame: The Nutcracker is rarely a stand-alone ballet anymore. It is a holiday event, a family ritual, and a financial cornerstone for Western ballet companies. Its recurrence mirrors the disciplinary structure of liturgical time: it returns every year to reaffirm the order it represents.

In short, The Nutcracker is not a children’s dream—it is a disciplinary ballet par excellence, in which childhood is constructed through aesthetic repetition, desire is managed through fairy-tale form, and global difference is reduced to consumable charm.

It is a ballet about how the West teaches itself to dream safely.