The Sleeping Beauty

• Choreography by Marius Petipa

• Music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• Context: A ballet commissioned for the Russian Imperial court; epitome of late 19th-century classical ballet; presents the tale of Princess Aurora, cursed to sleep for 100 years until awakened by a prince’s kiss.

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

The Sleeping Beauty is often described as the most “perfect” of all ballets—a paragon of classical symmetry, fairy-tale beauty, and aristocratic elegance. For Foucault, this perfection would not be an aesthetic triumph but rather a diagnosis: The Sleeping Beauty is a ritual inscription of monarchical time, disciplinary femininity, and state heteronormativity, choreographed so precisely as to transform ideology into nature.

The ballet stages time not as contingency but as architecture. Aurora’s 100-year sleep suspends narrative history—a Foucauldian dream of arrested temporality, in which social order is held in a kind of choreographic stasis until heterosexual redemption arrives in the form of the prince. The narrative form thus mimics what Foucault, in The Order of Things, called classical epistemic time: not evolutionary or historical, but cyclical, teleological, frozen within the aesthetic logic of power.

Aurora is not a subject but a function of a regime of visibility. Every step she performs, especially in the Rose Adagio, is about making the body intelligible, legible, and desirable under conditions of maximal scrutiny. The Rose Adagio itself—a sequence in which she must balance and pose as four suitors rotate around her—is a Foucauldian trial: a test of poise under observation, of the self as constructed through performative exposure.

This is not the awakening of individual agency. It is the reproduction of dynastic futurism, choreographed in the aesthetic language of obedience, purity, and patience. Aurora “wakes” only when kissed—not by accident, but by the right male subject, chosen not for passion but for political appropriateness. In this sense, The Sleeping Beauty is not a romantic fairy tale. It is a performance of reproductive security, where the future is restored, not reinvented.

Foucault, particularly in The Use of Pleasure and Ethics, would examine how this ballet constructs feminine subjectivity through enforced delay and deferred desire. Aurora is a character for whom nothing is permitted except waiting, performing, and finally, being claimed. Her sleep is not rest—it is symbolic preparation for becoming a normative woman, sanctified through marriage. Even her curse—spinning and bleeding—is about the danger of uncontrolled domestic labor, a reminder of the body's vulnerability to transgression.

Moreover, the ballet’s “fairy tale” framing is not innocent. It is a codified myth of monarchical continuity. The King and Queen, the courtly setting, the ritual christening—these are all scenes of pastoral governance. Everyone has a place. Every gesture is regulated. Even the fairies represent bureaucratic functions—each gifting specific traits, behaving like regulatory agencies for ideal femininity.

In Foucauldian terms, this is bio-political ballet par excellence: a spectacle of life managed, sex contained, time arrested, and power aestheticized. The audience does not merely enjoy beauty—they participate in an elaborate staging of normative temporality, one in which the future is sealed in a kiss and the present is rendered obedient through symmetry.

This is not a fantasy. It is a diagram.

Thus, The Sleeping Beauty becomes a performative grid through which the dancing body is subjected to the aesthetics of control, and where the dream of harmony is indistinguishable from the operation of a cultural apparatus disciplining desire, gender, and futurity.