The Rite of Spring

• Choreography: Vaslav Nijinsky

• Music: Igor Stravinsky

• Context: A primal, pagan ballet centered around fertility rituals and the sacrificial dance of a chosen maiden. Its premiere caused a famous riot in Paris. Choreographically radical and musically dissonant, it shattered classical aesthetics and birthed modernist performance.

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

The Rite of Spring is not a ballet—it is a rupture. A moment where the apparatus of classical dance, Enlightenment reason, and bourgeois aesthetic pleasure is ritually dismantled onstage. For Michel Foucault, this work would be a dramatic case study in the genealogy of power over the body, where the body is not normalized or eroticized, but sacrificed, collectivized, and broken into rhythms of archaic violence.

From the moment the curtain rises, The Rite stages a discontinuity in epistemic space. There is no narrative, no princely order, no recognizable subjectivity. Instead, there is collective repetition, ritualized group behavior, violence without individual psychology. The characters are not "dancers" in the traditional sense—they are bodies caught in a disciplinary field of sound and motion, subject not to will but to forces older than representation.

Foucault’s Order of Things teaches us to track shifts in the way knowledge, identity, and the body are constructed. The Rite marks a violent break with the episteme of classical ballet: the symmetrical legibility of Petipa gives way to irregular shapes, inward torsions, heaviness, and stamping. The body no longer obeys gravity as a visual illusion (as in pointework); instead, it collapses into the earth.

The choreography abolishes the vertical hierarchy of Enlightenment aesthetics, replacing it with horizontal submission to ritual. There is no individuality—only the herd, the tribe, the rhythm of pre-modern time.

And what is sacrificed? Not just the maiden. The Rite stages the sacrifice of the modern subject. The chosen girl, in her final sacrificial solo, performs not a tragic aria of autonomy—but a physical dissolution, a somatic surrender to the social ritual that demands her death. She is not choosing—she is chosen. She is not speaking—she is spoken by the ritual. This is not ethical freedom; this is pre-modern power.

Foucault might align this not with sovereign power (king, state) or disciplinary power (school, prison), but with ritual power—a pre-modern form that had never disappeared, merely been buried under aesthetics and technique. The Rite exhumed it.

Stravinsky’s music is crucial here. It is not melodic—it is an assault. Its rhythm is not accompaniment—it is the structure itself. Foucault would note how the music functions like a choreographic panopticon, producing bodily responses without narration or interiority. It is music that commands movement through sonic force, not through emotional suggestion.

The riot at the 1913 premiere is not incidental—it is symptomatic. The bourgeois audience, trained to consume ballet as refinement, is confronted with a machine of sacrifice, a sound-image of total disobedience to aesthetic norms. They are not disturbed by violence—they are disturbed because violence has returned to its originary function: as ritual, as power, as purification.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault wrote that “where there is power, there is resistance.” But in The Rite, there is no resistance. There is only the event. The dance does not critique; it enacts. The sacrifice is not symbolic; it is the structure.

Thus, The Rite of Spring is not a ballet about spring—it is about the metaphysical organization of bodies under a regime of sonic and choreographic law. It does not decorate time—it destroys it and remakes it.

It is not beauty. It is ritualized rupture.