Dance Chronicle

ISSN: 0147-2526 (Print) 1532-4257 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ldnc20

Talking Dancing: Véronique Doisneau and the

Somato-Discursive Invention of the Choreographic
Sujet

Noémie Solomon

To cite this article: Noémie Solomon (2018) Talking Dancing: Véronique Doisneau and the
Somato-Discursive Invention of the Choreographic Sujet, Dance Chronicle, 41:1, 29-50

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2018.1415061

Published online: 16 Feb 2018.

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DANCE CHRONICLE
2018, VOL. 41, NO. 1, 29–50
https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2018.1415061

ronique Doisneau and the

Talking Dancing: Ve
Somato-Discursive Invention of the Choreographic Sujet
No

emie Solomon

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Invited to make a work for the corps de ballet of the Paris Ballet; contemporary dance;
Opera, J
ero
^me Bel creates a bio-choreography of one of its narration; subjectivity
subjects: V

eronique Doisneau. The insertion of the ballerina’s
idiosyncratic narratives and gestures stages the linguistic
materiality of the dancer: it articulates the intricacy of a
body as matter in the grasp of a network of somatic and
discursive operations. By examining the binding of
movement and narration in the (re)production of the ballet
sujet across history, V
eronique Doisneau (2004) dissects and
ultimately reenergizes dance’s subject, particularly in relation
to the histories and methodologies of subjectivation resident
within the choreographic discipline.

A dancer’s voice
September 22, 2004. J
er^
ome Bel presents his new creation V
eronique Doisneau at
the Paris Opera.* The evening pays homage to the corps de ballet: Bel’s solo thus


appears between two ballets, Harald Lander’s Etudes (1952) and Jerome Robbins’s
Glass Pieces (1983), each of which depicts, through a succession of impressive
tableaus, numbers of dancers performing stunning unison sequences and meticu-
lously orchestrated processions.
On the opening night, the annual “gala” precedes the performances. A cen-
turies-old tradition at the Paris Opera, the gala launches the dance season as
the entire company, from the youngest students to the
etoiles, is presented to
its public. This spectacular and methodical display of all dancers, ranked
according to their various functions on the stage of the Paris Opera institu-
tion, exposes a hierarchical, yet unified, body. With precise and virtually iden-
tical movements, the numerous dancers seem to merge into a single
proposition: they come into view as a harmonized corps de ballet—one that is
overwhelmingly young, white, able, and mute; one that has been invested and

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ldnc.


V
eronique Doisneau (2004); concept: J
er^ome Bel; performer: V
eronique Doisneau; with excerpts from ballets by Jean
Coralli and Jules Perrot (Giselle), Merce Cunningham (Points in Space), Mats Ek (Giselle), Rudolf Nureyev (La Bayadere,
Marius Petipa; Le Lac des cygnes, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov); premiere: September 22, 2004, Paris National Opera,
Palais Garnier. My analysis draws from having witnessed a live performance of the work on September 24, 2004 at
the Paris National Opera, Palais Garnier, and from watching the film V
eronique Doisneau (2005), directed by J
erome
Bel and Pierre Dupouey (37 minutes).
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
30 N. SOLOMON

regulated by the disciplinary project of dance throughout the modern era.

Thus choreographed, the dancers parading on the stage of the Paris Opera
appear homogenous and docile. Indeed, throughout this program dedicated to
the corps de ballet as a “foundational figure of dance” and acknowledged by
then–artistic director Brigitte Lefevre as a mechanism of “excellence and rigor-
ous labor,”1 one might witness the ways in which ballet as an institution seeks
to even out corporeal differences or discrepancies: onstage, and at a remove
from the spectators, each dancer moves gracefully and in an
orderly fashion, and each remains subtly elusive. From the perspective of the
audience member, the dancer appears as an ungraspable image of a sleek and
disciplined ideal.
In contrast to the gala’s demonstration of such an apparatus of the spectacular,
V
eronique Doisneau suggests an unexpected potential for variation, embodied in the
figure of the female ballet dancer. By unfolding a series of idiosyncratic stories and
dance excerpts, the piece literally gives voice to the subject of dance: it draws atten-
tion to the linguistic materiality of the dancer, highlighting the somatic and discur-
sive labor that shapes and ultimately rearticulates the disciplinary body.
When Bel was invited to make a piece for the corps de ballet, he decided to stage
a choreographic documentary on and by one of its dancers, V
eronique Doisneau, a
sujet, in the terminology of the Paris Opera, at the dawn of her retirement. In the
thirty-minute long performance, the dancer retrospectively considers her own
career as a sujet inside this highly specialized institution: she narrates and re-enacts
some of her experiences as a member of the Paris Opera Ballet during the last
twenty years.
The piece begins with the dancer entering the stage, dressed in sweat pants, car-
rying a bottle of water, a tutu, and some pointe shoes (see Figure 1). Serene and
audacious at once, she looks at the audience, addressing the spectators directly: she
says her name is V
eronique Doisneau, she is forty-one years old, one year away
from reaching the mandatory age of retirement. She has a husband and two chil-
dren. She makes 3500 Euros a month. She specifies, for those who would be too
far away to distinguish her face—that is, for the spectators located in the farthest,
cheapest seats of the auditorium—that people often tell her she looks like the
actress Isabelle Huppert, thus pointing to the ways in which the proscenium as
spatial mechanism regulates the visibility of the dancing bodies onstage, even
before the dance begins. And she goes on, talking slowly, articulating every
word, with a voice that is measured and deliberate. She discloses her social, pro-
fessional, marital, and financial status, making explicit that performance is first
of all a form of specialized labor. She tells us she has spent most of her life danc-
ing in the corps de ballet. With an astonishing candor, yet without sentimental-
ity, she says she was both too fragile (she had a back operation when she was
twenty years old) and not gifted enough to rise higher, to the coveted status of

etoile. Doisneau tells the audience she always wanted to dance the role of Giselle.
She never did, but she knows the score by heart. Then, she sits down,
 DANCE CHRONICLE 31

Figure 1. V
eronique Doisneau (2004), choreography by J
er^ome Bel, performer: V
eronique Doisneau,
photography © Icare.

methodically puts on her pointe shoes and tutu, and prepares to perform a pas-
sage of the ballet, which is the opening dance of Giselle with the Duke Albrecht,
invisibly cast in front of us. She sings bits of the music and tells us every detail of
the act’s unfolding: what the corps de ballet does in the background, when and
how she is to be lifted. She pursues this uncanny dance for a few minutes,
accounting for all the movements enacted by the
etoile as well as the dance’s
many supporting elements—the male dancer, the corps de ballet, the music, the
lighting, and so forth. Her performance astutely reminds us that every actor,
every constituent involved in this colossal apparatus that is the Paris Opera, con-
jointly works to bring the
etoile to light.
When she stops her dance, suddenly, she is out of breath and then we wait, a
few seconds, a few minutes perhaps, for her to get her breath back. The whole audi-
ence is silent, suspended with her breathing body, looking at and listening to the
amplified small and repeated movements, following the slight and subtle variations
32 N. SOLOMON

of her tonicity while she inhales and exhales noisily. The rhythm of her breathing
gradually slows down and becomes almost inaudible, until the quasi-disappearance
of her thorax’s motion. Deprived of spectacular artifices such as stage makeup, cos-
tume, or lights, the dancing body is here exposed with a simplicity that stands out
from the usual opulence and sleekness embodied by the ballerina. By drawing
attention to the smallest details of her corporeity, the ballerina’s mode of presence,
and her discursive input, contrast with the spectacle usually offered on this
proscenium.
V
eronique Doisneau marked a turn in Bel’s oeuvre. Early works, dating from
the mid-1990s, including Nom donn
e par l’auteur (1994), J
er^ome Bel (1995), Le
Dernier Spectacle (1998), Xavier Le Roy (2000), and The Show Must Go On
(2001), addressed and challenged issues relative to dance making and its theatri-
cal apparatus. Among Bel’s choreographic tactics noticeable in these early works
is the slowing and parsing of gestural and spectacular flows. Bel experimented
with techniques, including repetition and quotation, and employed everyday
movements, lengthy moments of stillness, and changes in scale to question the
fundamental conditions of dance representation. With V
eronique Doisneau, Bel
inaugurated a new period in which he began investigating the work of the dancer
as singular and affective labor. In such pieces as Isabel Torres (2005), Pichet Klun-
chun and Myself (2005), Lutz F€orster (2009), and C
edric Andrieux (2009), the
choreographer created a series of pas de deux with dancers from a range of back-
grounds: from ballet to tanztheater, and from Thai traditional dance to Cunning-
ham technique.
Speaking of V
eronique Doisneau, Bel describes what is at stake in the work as
“the relation of this precise human being with choreography, with its structure,
which is similar to the social structure of the company and the society of the nine-
teenth century. The choreographies V
eronique Doisneau dances are structured as
the social organization where V
eronique Doisneau lives and works.”2 Bel’s theatri-
cal documentary therefore voices the specificities of a (dance) life: its distinct
movement trainings, as well as its discursive and institutional sets of knowledge.
“In fact,” Bel suggests, “I did nothing else than proposing a mechanism which
enabled the production of the discourse of the dancer. That is what I am interested
in now: listening to a singular experience and giving it back to the audience.”3 By
enabling a somatic and discursive account of the dancer on the stage of the Paris
Opera, an experimental production of history, V
eronique Doisneau expresses alter-
native modalities of relation between the figures of the dancer, the choreographer,
and the spectator as they coexist within this highly codified institution.
Written from a feminist perspective, this essay on V
eronique Doisneau focuses on
the female dancer who emerges in the solo; it examines the singularities of a life
embodied onstage as well as the potential the solo affords the ballerina who labors
within the disciplinary apparatus of the Paris Opera. As such, this essay investigates
and delves into the ways in which this biographic choreography blurs the bound-
aries between the choreographer and the dancer, and between a dancer’s work and
 DANCE CHRONICLE 33

her life. When V
eronique Doisneau enacts the role of the
etoile that she was never
allowed to perform, or when she begins to voice her own story in this institution,
one can argue she trespasses a series of disciplinary thresholds that have been imple-
mented by the institution. Indeed, the performance enacts a series of transgressions:
the female dancer crosses boundaries onstage, moving from muteness and docility
to agency. Her voice resonates with the operations of subjection at work within the
institution, which I discuss below, reminding us that the characteristic that is per-
haps most symptomatic of the ballerina’s docile and disciplined body lies in its
muteness—in the ways in which the dancer has maintained a complicated relation
with discourse and narrative resulting from the paucity of her use of language. As
dance studies scholar Susan Leigh Foster reminds us, “Ballet achieved its narrative
voice and coherence by turning the female dancer into a commodity, and the danc-
ing body into a no-body.”4 Applying Foster’s notion, one might say that the perfor-
mance of V
eronique Doisneau interrupts the processes of normalization and
commodification in ballet that cast both the dancing body and the female dancer
into “mute and malleable instruments.”5 In other words, Bel’s work makes a critical
intervention by enabling the female dancer to speak for herself, and by giving a
voice to the corps de ballet in a historical and political context that has systemati-
cally silenced the woman—while often using and abusing her body.* In V
eronique
Doisneau, the female dancer moves away from her positions as an object and as an
instrument of power to take hold of her body and of her practice. She assumes the
power of the stage and of speech to claim agency on behalf of the dancer and the
woman. The performance is therefore one of empowerment: it imbues the danseuse
with potential for action.
Thus, the dancer appearing on the stage of the Paris Opera becomes a woman
who dances: V
eronique Doisneau. By affording the typically mute dancer the
opportunity to speak, to voice idiosyncrasies and textures, the ballerina here reap-
propriates and rearticulates her choreographic practice. She challenges the position
of pure alterity in which she has been cast across the modern regime of significa-
tion, where dance is seen as a “pure act of metamorphoses” or as a “metaphor for
thoughts,” in the words of poet-philosophers Paul Val
ery and Alain Badiou,
respectively.6 As a seminal example of a major literary and philosophical tradition
ranging from Th
eophile Gautier to Badiou and beyond, St
ephane Mallarm
e

Numerous critiques have been formulated in dance studies on the politics of gender in ballet and its regime of
representation. For instance, Cynthia Novack argues that “stereotypes of gender which perpetuate representations
of women as fragile creatures supported by powerful men are connected to a training system which is extremely
technical and rigorous, and is offered to large numbers of children, mostly girls.” Cynthia Novack, “Ballet, Gender
and Cultural Power,” in Dance, Gender and Culture, ed. Helen Thomas (London: Macmillan, 1993), 39. Christy Adair
claims that “women do not represent themselves in ballet.” Christy Adair, Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1992), 116; Ann Daly argues that ballet is “rooted in an ideology which denies women their own
agency” Ann Daly, “Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory,
vol. 3, no. 2 (1987), 17. For more feminist readings of ballet and its relation to heterosexual structures, see Sally
Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (New York: Routledge, 1988); Susan Leigh Foster, “The Ballerina’s
Phallic Pointe,” in Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1996), 1–25; Judith L. Hanna, Dance, Sex and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
34 N. SOLOMON

describes the danseuse onstage as she constantly flees—or frees herself—from her
identity and her artistic function. As Mallarm
e puts it, the danseuse “is not a
woman who dances,” because “she is not a woman” and “she does not dance.”
Instead, she is a “metaphor,” “a bodily writing” and an embodied idea, that is, a
rhetorical figure in action. Through the motion of the dance itself with its “prodi-
gious shortcuts and impulses” that undermine the structures of meaning, Mallarm
e
sees the danseuse as a radical form of writing that moves away from the burden of
textuality and identity.* The danseuse is not a woman tied to material conditions;
as pure motion, evolving in an abstract realm, the danseuse is, in Val
ery’s words,
“in another world; . . . one that she weaves with her steps and builds with her
gestures.”7
Importantly, the danseuse’s muteness allows for her depersonalization to take
place, for Mallarm
e describes the voice as that element that defines the person.
Above any other “organ” or artistic function, for Mallarm
e, the voice identifies the
self in its unity and identity. Without the function of speech, the dancer onstage is
a “no-body,” to bring back Foster’s expression, free to gesture beyond regimes of
signification, alluding to new functions of the imaginary and refiguring structures
of thought.8 Yet, freedom from the structure of signification is produced at the
expense of the woman’s body: such freedom permits a distinct model of femininity
as both mute and anonymous. In short, in the philosophical and literary realms of
Western dance, the danseuse becomes legible because of the muteness and ano-
nymity of her dancing body. By giving a voice to the body that is usually required
to remain silent and is restricted to the language of gestures, V
eronique Doisneau
powerfully undoes this movement of depersonalization.
I argue the work stages an impersonal voice that grounds and energizes the
female dancing body, yet it does so without (re)casting the dancer as a person
or individual—that is, as a mere object of the discipline. Rather, the work ima-
gines the dancer as choreographic multiplicity, enabling and activating new
articulations between bodies and meanings, between histories and potentials.
As such, V
eronique Doisneau takes place within an artistic contemporary
framework in which performing bodies have thoroughly experimented with
speech, freeing themselves from absent authorities and the languages of “other.”
Performance theorist Bojana Kunst evokes this process in which the dancing
body no longer imitates the “articulate voice” of the “other” and acquires a
voice of its own:

With the discovery of voice, the dancing body shatters the harmonious relationship
between its presence and representation. There is no more harmony between the inside
and the outside of the body; the body becomes visible and audible precisely within this

 savoir que la danseuse n’est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtapos
es qu’elle n’est pas une femme,
“A
mais une m
etaphore [. . .] et qu’elle ne danse pas, sugg
erant, par le prodige de raccourcis ou d’
elans, avec une

ecriture corporelle ce qu’il faudrait des paragraphes en prose dialogu
ee autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans
la r
edaction: poeme d
egag
e de tout appareil de scribe.” St
ephane Mallarm
e, “Ballets” [1886], in Œuvres Completes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 304, my translation.
 DANCE CHRONICLE 35

gap, when the harmonious relationship between the movement of the body and the spec-
tacle of its subjectivity has broken down.9

In this regard, Doisneau’s voice undoes the stable, coherent identity and subjec-
tivity assigned to the female dancer. Uniting the supposed disjunction between the
body’s interior and exterior, between the dancer as inherently mute and the physi-
cal malleability for which she has trained, the speaking ballerina turns the dancing
body inside out and exposes on its surface a series of words, gestures, affects. The
introduction of a voice—V
eronique Dosineau’s voice—individuates the perform-
ing body in a process that restlessly questions the borders between life and perfor-
mance, a body and its technical training. The linguistic materiality of the dancer is
thus exposed as a series of mediated or carefully constructed operations through-
out the performance. The dance of words reflects on and gestures in and out of the
ballet discipline in a complex assemblage of facts and fictions. In this regard, one
might ask what it means for the dancer to affirm onstage her status as a worker a
few days away from retirement, and then to perform the piece for the year to
come. The work suspends and extends her institutionalized structure of labor, by
playing with conventions and horizons of expectation. V
eronique Doisneau—at
once a dancer, a work, and a conceptual persona*—therefore voices issues of
authority and authorship, as it challenges and redistributes the modes of relation
and hierarchies among the dancer, the choreographer, and the ballet institution.

Genealogy of a sujet
Standing alone in the middle of the vast proscenium, the dancer speaks: “In the
hierarchy of the Paris Opera, I am a sujet.” With this statement, V
eronique Dois-
neau not only reaffirms her status as subject of the institution, but she further
defines her particular role within that institution. In the Paris Opera hierarchy, the
sujet corresponds to the third rank in its organization, above that of the quadrille
and coryph
ee, and below the premiere danseuse and
etoile. Located at the midpoint
in this gradated system, the sujet can at times perform soloist roles, but is most
often part of the corps de ballet. In other words, every dancer on the stage of the
Paris Opera occupies a precise position as part of a complex hierarchical structure,
with manifold methodological and historical ramifications.
Above the dancer, as she speaks while standing at the center of the proscenium
arch, one sees, coiled in a trompe-l’oeil red velvet curtain, the inscription that reads,
“Anno 1669,” Latin remembrance of the year in which the Acad
emie de Musique et
de Danse was established. When V
eronique Doisneau, almost three-and-a-half cen-
turies later, enters the scene from the wings, walks onto the front stage, stops at its

Gilles Deleuze and F
elix Guattari conceive of the “conceptual persona” as that which becomes the “power of the con-
cept.” That is, through these personas, concepts are given body. These concepts constitute “true agent[s] of enuncia-
tion,” or the “third person,” which might be seen as the author’s or concepteur’s “heteronym.” As Bel describes
himself as the “concepteur” of the work, I argue the relation with his “subject” exists alongside this notion of concep-
tual persona that plays a singular role in his body of work. Gilles Deleuze and F
elix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?,
trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (1991; repr., London: Verso, 1994), 64–65.
36 N. SOLOMON

middle, looks at the audience, and begins to address the onlookers, she engages in a
threefold operation: she embodies, dissects, and refigures the sujet as a constitutive
figure of the ballet institution. But how does the sujet bear the marks of technologies
of power constitutive of the choreographic discipline? What might an examination
of the dance sujet tell us about the disciplinary borders of dance, as well as the con-
stant somato-discursive traffic that shapes its contours? Taking my cue from the
performance, I argue that the sujet constitutes a pivotal locus not only in the organi-
zation of the Paris Opera, but also in the emergence of the modern discipline of
choreography. In order to better grasp the methodological and conceptual interven-
tion enacted by V
eronique Doisneau, I now outline a genealogy of the choreographic
sujet as it is embedded in a series of historical and political discourses.
Writing in the first half of the eighteenth century, the noted diarist Duc de
Saint-Simon declared, “The king’s Grandeur and Majesty derive from the fact that
in his presence his subjects are unequal. . . . Without gradation, inequality, and dif-
ference, order is impossible.”10 And indeed, the system of “gradation, inequality,
and difference,” which ensures strict order and hierarchical display on the stage of
the Paris Opera by carefully assigning and placing each of its sujets, might be
traced back to the seventeenth-century French monarchic regime. More precisely,
one might locate the emergence of the choreographic discipline as a key moment
in the constitution of the modern concept of the subject. In 1661, Louis XIV insti-
tutionalized dance by establishing the Acad
emie Royale de Danse. The Lettres Pat-
entes du Roy pour l’
etablissement de l’Acad
emie Royale de Danse en la ville de Paris,
which would be ratified by the French parliament the following year, outline the
legal and political grounds on which the dancing body would be turned into a dis-
ciplinary object. Labeled the first official act of Louis XIV’s personal reign, the pub-
lication of the Lettres Patentes can be read as a means to consolidate power in the
hands of the monarch, as the letters themselves inaugurate a vast process of cen-
tralization of the arts and institutionalization of knowledge.* In this regard, the
function of dance in the deployment of power cannot be overstated: in seven-
teenth-century France, dance was not cast as a minor or peripheral art; rather, it
operated as a vital force in the subjecting of the political body. The Lettres Patentes,
delineating a series of technological and political functions for the nascent disci-
pline and its sujets, thus helped to determine the role to which dance would be
assigned at the dawn of modernity.
The Lettres Patentes begin by locating dance along a tradition that positions the
art as instrumental to the constitution of the political body: “The Art of Dance has

The Lettres patentes du Roy pour l’
etablissement de l’Acad
emie royale de danse en la ville de Paris predate the revitali-
zation and the creation of a number of other academies, including those of Belles Lettres (1663), Sciences (1666),
Op
era (1669), and Architecture (1671). For full transcriptions, translations, commentaries, and analyses of the Lettres
Patentes, see Maureen Needham, “Louis XIV and the Acad
emie Royale de Danse, 1661: A Commentary and Transla-
tion,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 20, no. 2 (1997): 173–90; Marie-Jo€elle Louison-Lassabliere, Feuillets pour Terpsichore (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007); Mark Franko, “Moliere and Textual Closure, Comedy-Ballet, 1661–1670” and “Appendix 3: Origi-
nal Text and Translation of Lettres Patentes (1662),” in Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 108–32; 166–85.
 DANCE CHRONICLE 37

always been recognized as one of the most honorable and necessary for forming
the body, and giving it the first and most natural dispositions for all sorts of exer-
cises, and among others for the exercise of arms.”11 By praising dance’s role in
“forming the body,” as its practice endows its subjects with the most “honorable”
and “natural dispositions” that have proven useful in both the court ballet and the
battlefield, this legal document establishes a key parallel between the art of dancing
and that of the military.* The Lettres Patentes go on to justify the need for a new
academy in order to overcome a state of chaos. Indeed, the Lettres evoke “the dis-
orders and confusion of the last wars,” in which numbers of “incompetents” have
misused and abused the art: “The infinite number of ignorants have tried to disfig-
ure and corrupt dance.”12 Pointing to the period of civil instability that preceded
his accession to the throne, known as La Fronde, Louis XIV denounced the disar-
ray that reigned across his territory and accused the rebellious aristocrats of having
appropriated, deformed, and dishonored the said art form. The document thus
seeks to regain and impose control over a practice seen as scattered aesthetically
and geographically, and to ensure the shaping of an orderly and homogenous
dancing body.
Appointing a committee of thirteen dance experts, Louis XIV’s Lettres Patentes
outlined the following agenda for the new dance academy: to evict those who have
misled the art with imperfect or lax practices, seen as detrimental to the quality of
the performances and to the social status of the dancer; to guarantee that dance be
taught with the same seriousness, method, and perfection as the military arts; and
to create exhaustive lists of all existing dances, while stimulating the composition
of new ones. That is, the king effectively oversaw the past and future of dance while
recruiting new dancers according to their “abilities” and “merits,” in order to pro-
vide the royal productions with a needed corps de ballet.
The Lettres Patentes therefore portray dance as an art that needs to be fixed, reg-
ulated, centralized. Consequently, the dancing body appears in need of training. By
outlining these deficiencies, the monarchic regime extended its grip over the mov-
ing body through a series of legislative and appropriating gestures. In other words,
the observed loss of technical standards demanded strict regulatory actions that
continued to shape the way in which dance was learned and transmitted—
deployed—throughout the territory. The Lettres Patentes, therefore, constitute not
simply a choreographic treatise with guidelines regulating the processes of creating
ballets; rather, the Lettres trace the techno-political ground for the new discipline.
The document stresses the need to rehabilitate the standards and status of dance
by means of tightly controlling how the body is to be trained to move.

The link between dance, the academy, and the military has precedents that can be traced back to antiquity and to
the rise of Western civilization. For instance, Plato considered dance to be crucial in the training of young elites,
advocating the practice of choral dances as one of the principal exercises for the Greek. The philosopher further
equated the uneducated person (apaideutos) with one who lacked choral art and was “danceless” (achoreitos): “A
person is without culture who is without the dance.” Plato, quoted in James Miller, Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic
Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 14.
38 N. SOLOMON

A multifaceted, pedagogical apparatus emerges from the document’s meticulous

attention to the movements of the dancing body, while its implicit pedagogy delin-
eates a new conception of the dancer as an autonomous figure. This disciplinary
apparatus prompts the elaboration of numerous systems for the codification and
standardization of movement, each system fragmenting the body into regimented
classifications of figures (comprised of steps, positions, and attitudes), which are to
be paralleled by dance actions themselves.* New technical achievements emerge,
made possible by the Baroque aesthetic and its inherent emphasis on movement as
it imagines the body moving through a series of infinite, dynamic articulations. The
Lettres Patentes thus simultaneously invest every recess of the dancing body through
means of a thorough partitioning, while circumscribing the body as an autonomous
figure by acknowledging its physical and dynamic capacities. By delimiting a set of
technical possibilities, or norms, for the dancing body, the document increases the
possibilities for articulations—or movements. In this regard, the nascent choreo-
graphic discipline appears already as a flexible machine, able to isolate, decorticate,
and break down movement to better mimic the dancing body and reassign its every
form. Hence, by establishing the disciplinary boundaries of dance, the Lettres Pat-
entes outline a mobile, autonomous sujet by means of discursive guidelines that
prompt, direct, and reenergize the danced gesture.
One might follow the emphasis on technical training as was mapped onto the danc-
ing bodies, as the new disciplinary technologies sought to make the dancers wholly visi-
ble. As Mark Franko’s seminal work on dance and the Baroque body has shown, the
“Letters Patent focus on the technologies of physical training itself in order to reassert
control over the entire spectacle.”13 In other words, the dance apparatus operated with
an inside-out motion: the meticulous concern for ordered movement and visibility is
figured onto the surface of the dancer, as each contour, position, and trajectory was
mapped out on a body presented for view. In that regard, Franko reminds us that the
emergence of the dance discipline was an “art under royal surveillance.”14 The
dancing sujet took form under the gaze of the monarch who threw light onto every
detail of its figure. Importantly, one can see around the same time the development
of “turnout,” a physical articulation to which the dancing body was subjected as a
technological and political imperative. “Toward the outside”: as a new technical
requirement, the en dehors principle can be read not only as it increased the mobility of
the limbs, but perhaps most importantly as it opened out, or splayed, the performing
bodies to the flat horizon of the perspective plane, so that the dancers never presented
their backs to the king. The newly defined positions of the body, and particularly those
of the feet, in which the legs were rotated toward the outside, not only assigned specific
shapes onto the body—that is, they determined what was to be seen—but these posi-
tions constituted a precise mapping, laying the ground for the feet to move along a

This standardization is echoed by Raoul-Auger Feuillet’s Chor
egraphie ou L’art de d
ecrire la danse par caracteres, fig-
ures et signes desmonstratifs (Paris, 1700), a book describing the system of notation ordered by Louis XIV that not
only coins the word “chor
egraphie,” but also further codifies court dance through the writing of steps.
 DANCE CHRONICLE 39

predefined path. The en dehors, dance’s technical impulse emerging in the Baroque,
thus shaped the contours of the dancing body and its possible trajectories, subjecting
even its most minute movements to the outside gaze.
The notion of en dehors, as a specific form of exteriorization of power, presents
an interesting paradox: it maps onto the moving body an interior seen as the repre-
sentation of the most “honorable” and “natural dispositions,” yet it also emphasizes
how its physical implementation can only surface through a thorough process
required in the forming of the body. In other words, the en dehors presupposes an
en dedans as “natural” and irreducible interior that can be figured onto a body’s
exterior, and yet it acknowledges the need to train and shape that exteriority for the
body to be seen as endowed with a “natural,” graceful interiority. As Jean-Georges
Noverre put it in his Lettres sur la Danse et sur les Ballets, published a century later,
“Nothing is so important, Sir, as the turning outward of the thigh for a fine danc-
ing and nothing is so natural to men as the contrary position.”15 The outward
motion thus requires a constant negotiation between a body’s ability—what it is
capable of—and the conditions of its representation—how to make the whole
body seen.
This paradox might be first and foremost enacted in the performance of the
king.* Indeed, the Lettres Patentes define dance as a noble art de facto, the best
dancing artist in the genre being Louis XIV himself, whose physique was elsewhere
described as a “divine appearance and carriage”16 and defined as the ideal—and the
norm—for dance performance. Yet, as many historians have pointed out, the king
worked continuously in order to acquire these technical abilities—or “natural dispo-
sitions” as stated in the Lettres—which could be seen as his aural prestige.y The
dancing master Pierre Beauchamps worked daily with the king for more than twenty
years, rehearsing specific movements with him every morning for several hours.
Hence, dance was the primary outward expression of the king’s divine qualities; nev-
ertheless, these “natural dispositions” needed to be constantly trained, choreo-
graphed, rehearsed, and performed on the stage of the ballets as throughout court
life. Every aspect at court was thus consciously ritualized: each action was turned
into a choreographed ballet, from the solemn morning lever in which the courtiers
surrounded the king, like a docile corps de ballet in serried ranks. Each courtier was
assigned to different functions, each one acting as a supporting element to highlight

For a detailed consideration of the dance performances of Louis XIV, as well as their role in the politics of representa-
tion in seventeenth-century France, see Mark Franko, “Figural Inversion of Louis XIV’s Dancing Body,” in Acting on the
Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines, eds. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press, 2000), 35–51; Mark Franko, “Moliere and Textual Closure,” in Dance as Text, 108–132; R
egine Astier,
“Louis XIV, ‘Premier Danseur,’” in Sun King: The Ascendency of French Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV, ed. David
Lee Rubin (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992), 73–102; Marie Françoise Christout, Le ballet de cour
de Louis XIV, 1643–1672: Mises en scene (Paris: Centre national de la danse, 2005).
y
The king’s aura could be seen as throwing light onto its sujets, enlightening and blinding them at once. Louis XIV’s
first performance at the court, Ballet de la nuit (1653), coincides with the aftermath of the Fronde, as the monarch
returned to Paris. In this extended ballet (lasting more than eight hours), the young king emerged at the very end of
the night, symbolizing the nation’s dark times, as the rising of the sun. His title of Roi soleil was bestowed on him as a
result of this performance.
40 N. SOLOMON

the monarch’s performance. The performance extended throughout the day to

include such diverse activities as fencing, eating, and defecating. Therefore, one
might argue the body of the king was magnified to serve as a strict model for or
definition of the dancer. Yet this model was figured precisely through perfor-
mance. In other words, power was not conveyed solely through representations
of the king, but it was, rather, propagated through his body in motion; the king’s
divine power was exteriorized—that is, it was performed—through a set of highly
technical choreographic articulations.* Franko has described the king as an “early
modern techno-body”: his technical performance entailed risk, virtuosity, and the
expression of affects that constantly rearticulated the ways in which the political
body was figured and deployed.17
The institution of a standardized technical training for the dancer thus extended
beyond the disciplinary boundaries of dance, that is, it spread outside the stages of
the court ballets and the battlefields to reach out to the most diverse aspects of
French society, a society that the monarchy and aristocracy identified as being in
need of training. So began the shaping of a new, uniform political body achieved
through the institutionalization of dance training. As eighteenth-century dance mas-
ter Charles Pauli remarked on the early academic developments of dance, “One has
yet to find a better form of exercise for shaping and molding man’s exterior.”18 In
Foucauldian terms, dance was a micro-mechanism of power that was vital in the
forming of a modern political body, in which individuals were molded to serve the
needs of power.
I discuss below the ways in which Michel Foucault’s work on subjectivity offers
a rich way of analyzing how V
eronique Doisneau experiments with subjectivity.
For now it may be worth noting that the modern project of mapping out dancing
sujets into full visibility casts many zones of shadow. Indeed, dating from the start
of the modern era, multitudes of people have been excluded and denied access to
dance and its representation. One might argue that the birth of the choreographic
discipline—and arguably of the French, modern, political body—sets a ground
against corporeal heterogeneity. This ongoing process of homogenization and nor-
malization of the body continues to haunt the ballet institution: it was without a
doubt still visible on the stage of the Paris Opera in 2004 as the season opened
with its traditional gala. As already noted, the parading sujets were carefully
ordered and hierarchized as they converged into a smooth, unified corps de ballet.y

On the issue of power and representation under Louis XIV’s reign, see two groundbreaking works: Louis Marin, Le
Portrait du roi (Paris:
Editions de minuit, 1983); and Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au
temps de Louis XIV (Paris:
Editions de minuit, 1981).
y
Major ballet companies sprouted all around the world in the second part of the twentieth century, in major cities
such as Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Cairo, and Johannesburg, producing ballet bodies (whose performance and shapes
bear uncanny similarities) across a range of cultures. If some international companies have managed better than
others to bridge the gap between the ideal ballet body and local cultures, it is important to point out that the Paris
Opera Ballet, to this day, is overwhelmingly white. This touches upon a crucial issue in French contemporary society,
namely the reluctance to represent or incorporate, for instance, the West African and Maghreb populations from
former French colonies.
 DANCE CHRONICLE 41

I argue that the performance of V
eronique Doisneau conjures up these historical

and political technologies that imagine and shape the dance sujet, from the incep-
tion of the choreographic discipline through the development of ballet and all the
way to the present. And yet, the performance of V
eronique Doisneau engages with
those operations, enacting experimental assemblages that untether and reinvent
orders, hierarchies, meanings, and feelings to fill the stage of the Paris Opera with
variation and singularity.

Choreographic subjectivations
In the middle of her performance, Doisneau proposes to enact an excerpt of Swan
Lake, the score she danced the most in her career. Doisneau tells the audience,
One of the most beautiful things in classical ballet, is the passage in Swan Lake where the
thirty-two dancers of the corps de ballet dance together. But in that part there are long
moments of immobility, the poses, in which we become a human scenery in order to
highlight the
etoile. And for us, it is the most horrible thing to do. I for one want to
scream, leave the stage.19

After casually asking the house technician to put the soundtrack on, she walks
toward the back of the stage, far from the center, turns her back to the audience,
and begins to enact the corps de ballet’s part that usually takes place alongside—or
behind—the famous pas de deux from the second act. She starts with a few simple,
yet precise, arm gestures, and then takes a pose, a typical ballet position slightly
weightless and hung in the air, and holds it for several instants without moving or
blinking (see Figure 2). She stays in this demure position and waits patiently for sec-
onds, minutes—for what seems to be an endless moment. The lyrical surges in
Tchaikovsky’s music offer a compelling contrast to her persistent immobility; the
dramatic unfolding of the recorded orchestra seems to make tangible that which is
not happening onstage. The violin whines at length, and instead of the white swan’s
ample, articulated arm gestures, instead of a couple moving toward and away from
each other in an affected fashion, the audience is left with a single, still body, turning
slightly away, dodging gazes while framed within the immensity of the stage. After a
while, Doisneau starts to move again, methodically shifting arm and leg positions,
and then hopping across the stage in arabesque. Because the soundtrack comes
from a recording of a previous performance of the company, when she makes her
single legged steps one hears the rest of the corps de ballet, as many ghosts of the
swans, traveling across the proscenium on the rhythms of the orchestra. Suddenly,
this slight hubbub stops and the violin resumes; she is alone again and freezes in
another graceful position. And she sustains it. The music carries on, as a reminder
of the time passing by, despite the quasi-absence of events, thus disclosing the
dancer’s stillness as intense and durational.
The performance here redefines what matters onstage by moving its focus away
from the spectacle: it exposes what is usually obscured and sidelined by the perfor-
mance of the
etoile and makes sensible the choreographic labor of the sujet. In other
42 N. SOLOMON

Figure 2. V
eronique Doisneau (2004), choreography by J
er^ome Bel, performer: V
eronique Doisneau,
photography © Icare.

words, when V
eronique Doisneau gives nothing to see but a still body onstage, hold-
ing a strenuous pose for several minutes, the performance might be said to be mak-
ing an intervention in the field of visibility. If the dance proscenium organizes the
dancing bodies around the threshold of the visible in a very specific manner (by
placing bodies; through the use of scenery, light design, and costumes; and by acts
of framing, cutting, and editing what is happening onstage), these operations inflect
the ballet with order and hierarchy and thus prevent any indistinctness. Just as the
king’s “grandeur and majesty” results from the careful disposition of his sujets
around him, so the
etoile depends on the system of hierarchy and order that enables
her body to rise above the mass. For instance, in the annual opening parade of the
Paris Opera, spotlights continuously follow the extraordinary dancers, thus reinforc-
ing their aura and maintaining their prominence amidst the crowded stage. This
spectacular device frames that which is meant to be most meaningful, thus
 DANCE CHRONICLE 43

displaying in an eloquent manner how the sujet’s position is constantly assessed, as

it moves up (or falls out of) the echelons of the hierarchy. And yet, this is a
dynamic, relational process, and as such, it holds a certain ambivalence.
Mallarm
e addressed the paradoxical relation between the corps de ballet and the

etoile, stating, “For, of course, the corps de ballet, as a totality, will not figure
around the
etoile (what name could be more suitable!) the ideal dance of the con-
stellations.”* What the writer suggests is a constitutive instability, a play of abyss
and juncture, between the corps de ballet as totality and the dancing figure as sin-
gularity. The
etoile is always hors cadre (outside the frame; offscreen), never con-
tained by the corps the ballet, yet the
etoile also exposes a “mobile synthesis” of the
group’s attitudes. As for the sujets, their dance is made up of distinct fractals that
in their totality display the complexity of the group. What this suggests is
that the choreographic discipline may be seen as a mobile multiplicity, a distinct
practice of infrastructure. As the political theorist Angela Mitropoulos puts it, the
infrastructure is “the answer given to the question of movement and relation,”20
which here constantly reorganizes the relation between a few exceptional bodies
and the mass.
The work of Michel Foucault on the constitution of the subject across modern
society is relevant as the philosopher studies and details the formation of structures
of power in which the disciplinary tactic is that which is “situated on the axis that
links the singular and the multiple. It allows both the characterization of the indi-
vidual as individual, and the ordering of a given multiplicity.”21 This disciplinary
mechanism shapes the dance sujet into a docile, useful individual while constantly
organizing its relation to the mass, thus forming the basis for dance’s microphysics
of power.y As Foucault argues, through a skillful managing of the bodies, the disci-
pline first and foremost distributes bodies in space; and it deploys a range of tech-
niques for ensuring the ordering and the organization of human multiplicities.
The discipline thus creates architectural, functional, and hierarchical spaces that
mobilize the dance sujet, ensuring its “fixation” while allowing its “circulation.” In
this view, the creation in 1713 of the Conservatoire Royal de Danse or l’Ecole
de
l’Acad
emie can be seen as marking an important historical turn as the institution
brought about a new training regime located in the space of the Paris Opera in
order “to raise sujets capable of fulfilling employments that lack manpower.”22 The
establishment of an academy devoted to the shaping of dancing bodies allowed for

Mallarm
e, “Ballets,” 303 (my translation). “Car le corps de ballet, total, ne figurera autour de l’
etoile (peut-on mieux la
nommer!) la danse id
eale des constellations.”
y
Michel Foucault describes the individual as an effect of power that is always linked to the organization of the multi-
plicity. For Foucault, it is “a mistake to think of the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus.” Furthermore, one of
the first effects of power is precisely that “it allows bodies, gestures, discourses, and desires to be identified and con-
stituted as something individual.” In other words, “the individual is in fact a power effect” as well as a “relay”: “power
passes through the individuals it has constituted.” Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de
France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 29–30.
44 N. SOLOMON

the creation of a smooth and uniform ballet sujet: it established a closed space away
from foreign practices in order to secure a “disciplinary monotony,”23 thus deploy-
ing further the movement from sovereign to disciplinary power.* In 1784, the
school of dance opened its doors to young children (i.e., under twelve years old),
in an attempt to increase the time devoted to the practice of the discipline—and
conversely to reduce the time spent on the correction of “flaws” students may have
previously acquired. In other words, the discipline of dance training controlled the
distribution of time, as it constituted “a time without impurities or defects; a time
of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise.”24
The dancing body became an entity to be endlessly trained and reproduced,
embodying that which could be “subjected, used, transformed and improved.”25
Onstage, the dancing bodies are meticulously aligned and ordered according to the
specific function they fulfill, while they remain endlessly interchangeable.
An interesting aside on the interchangeability of the ballet dancers is evoca-
tively suggested by Bel in his performance-lecture entitled Le dernier spectacle,
une conf
erence (2004). Bel narrates an incident that took place a few days after
the premiere of V
eronique Doisneau at the Paris Opera, during the opening piece


on the program, Etudes (1952) by Harald Lander. This work consists of a one-act
ballet in which numerous dancers (all dressed in white leotards, short assorted
skirts, and pink tights) perform a theatrical version of the dance class—thus
amplifying the disciplinarian mechanism to what Foucault might describe as “the
truly important ceremony is that of exercise.”26 Beginning at the barre, the piece
stages many of the exercises repeated by the ballet dancer every day and ends
with a spectacular display by the
etoile. In this regard, the work might be seen as
alluding to the processes of becoming a dancer and becoming an
etoile—through
the repetition of precise, ordered, and hierarchical movements. On that particular
night, Bel explained in his lecture, the
etoile injured herself backstage after having
danced a significant part of the performance, and she was then promptly replaced
by her understudy—or doublure in French. Perhaps without surprise, the substi-
tution was entirely successful: it was said that no one in the audience noticed the
change of body that took place halfway through the piece. What this anecdote
points to is how the definition of the ballet dancer as sujet or
etoile—and its rec-
ognition by the audience as such—does not emerge from individual characteris-
tics, but rather from her position onstage as well as her differentiated relation
to the multiplicity. The dance discipline thus functions to create microorganisms
of power, exerting an infinitesimal control over the dancing individual while dis-
tributing the totality: in Foucault’s words, it stages a “political anatomy of the
detail.”27

During the eighteenth century, the dance institution thus became increasingly disciplinary, and the corps de ballet,
exclusively feminized.
 DANCE CHRONICLE 45

Onstage, power appears as that which is skillfully exercised: the dancing bodies are
subjected to a meticulous “program of actions” that organizes each and every move-
ment, gesture, attitude, and speed. The dancers are fully assessed and examined: under
the gaze of dancing masters and expert audiences, they are submitted to the ongoing
repetition of exercises that are decomposed analytically and systematically reordered.
The tasks imposed are repetitive yet differ slightly each time, functioning by gradients
to ensure their function to mold bodies. Dance as a distinct practice then transforms its
bodies: it locates gaps, and it instills hierarchy while pushing the dancers to conform
to—that is to embody—ideal forms whose limits, ever evolving, are always to be
reached.* The dance discipline thus manages to incorporate sets of knowledge
[savoir-faires] that are codified according to a norm, investing the smallest aspects of
the dancing body and seeking to make all of its action entirely efficient. In this view,
dance technique is the incorporation of power. Conversely, power emerges as a series
of technologies that constitute the dancing body as both its object tool—or relay, that is,
medium—by which it operates. In Foucault’s words, “discipline ‘makes’ [fabrique] indi-
viduals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects
and as instruments of its exercise.”28 In regard to Foucault’s analysis of a range of mech-
anisms, the dance discipline seems to be “exemplary,” for, since the classical era, dance
has exerted a thorough, sinuous, and productive power in shaping the skillful organiza-
tion of the modern body. The dance stage is but an apparatus of subjection, implement-
ing a series of “dispositions, maneuvers, tactics, techniques, functionings”29 that assign
the sujet to a series of shifting positions around thresholds of docility and utility, visibil-
ity and legibility.
Yet, I argue that this process of subjection, or the constitution of the subject in
relation to power, is never unidirectional. If Foucault suggests, throughout his
work, a reciprocal and complex interplay between the subject and the forces of
power, it is perhaps particularly the case in his later writings, when the author
coins the term “subjectivation” for the constitution of subjectivity.30 Earlier, Fou-
cault uses the term “subjection,” which encompasses the translation of both French
words assujettissement and suj
etion.y For Foucault, “subjection” usually means
“subjugation” while it also refers to the making of something into a subject. In
Judith Butler’s words, “subjection” refers both to “the process of becoming subor-
dinated by power as well as the process of becoming subject.”31 The theorization

In this regard, Foster describes the daily work of ballet dancers as they embody specific aesthetics ideas: “The daily
practical participation of a body in [ballet] makes of it a body-of-ideas.” Susan Leigh Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in
Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997),
236. Similarly, Hubert Godard argues that the reiteration of the same movements, referring to the same “imaginary,”
shapes a given dancing corporeity: by constantly repeating the same forms, whose mechanics are invested in a simi-
lar affective and symbolic manner, the staging of the daily class is built within a specific process of representation,
which creates the corporeity of the classical dancer. Hubert Godard, “C’est le mouvement qui donne corps au geste,”
Marsyas, no. 30 (June 1994): 72–77.
y
In French, assujettissement refers to the action or the result of the verb assujettir—that is, to subject, compel, impose
something, either by constraining or by assuring the immobility of the object; whereas suj
etion encompasses the
state of being submitted, subordinated, dependent. Both have been translated into English as “subjection.”
46 N. SOLOMON

of subjection in Foucault’s work has often been mistaken as a binary impasse

between a passive subject and the overwhelming forces of power.*
However, what the coining of “subjectivation” makes clear is that Foucault’s
work is not invested in reducing subjectivity to a mere effect of power and struc-
tures. Viewed as a process, or as performance, it always involves a dynamic and
reciprocal relation, which, for the subject, does not equate with an attitude of pas-
sivity, but perhaps more precisely, a slightly productive passivity or an active nega-
tion. Ultimately, by defining his neologism of “subjectivation” as the
encompassing, dynamic process by which subjects constitute themselves, Foucault
acknowledges forms of critical and creative agency for subjects in relation to the
dipositifsz of power they relate to. In other words, “subjectivation” envisages the
ways in which subjects are “creating themselves like pearls around the foreign par-
ticles of power.”32 In this view, power is always relational. Through a set of practi-
ces or what Foucault describes as “technologies of the self,” subjects constitute
themselves through the process of relating back to themselves: they operate on
their bodies, thoughts, conducts, ways of being in order to shape and transform
themselves.33 In a late interview published in 1984, “The Ethics of the Concern for
Self as Practice of Freedom,” Foucault thus suggests an alternative to modern
moral systems: shifting from an understanding of power and freedom in opposi-
tional terms, he asserts that the subject is not the “result” of a coercive practice, but
that which articulates itself through a practice of “self-formation.”34 The subject
strives for freedom—a process that he describes as the “ontological condition of
ethics”—not by breaking down or stepping outside of power structures, but by
folding forces of power onto its own corporeity. This relational and reciprocal
dance with power, with its disciplinary apparatuses, can thus be said to create new
possibilities for the attainment of knowledge, visibility, and signification.35 In other

This might be particularly explicit in dance studies scholarship, which overall has tended to emphasize in Foucault’s
work a binary, and, indeed, an incompatibility between the body as subject and the structures of power. At stake
are the ways in which this theory “overloads force” (Mark Franko, “Figural Inversions of Louis XIV’s Dancing Body,” in
Acting on the Past: Historical Performances across the Disciplines, eds. Mark Franko and Annette Richards [Middleton,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000], 45); the prominence given to historical inscription over a body as “pre-discur-
sive biological given” or even a “body-as-medium” (Mark Franko, “Archeological Choreographic Practices: Foucault
and Forsythe,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 24, no. 4 [2011]: 108); or the theory’s movement away from phe-
nomenology, which is equated with “an absence of dance-attuned consciousness” or any attention to motility phe-
nomena (Sally Ness, “Foucault’s Turn from Phenomenology: Implications for Dance Studies,” Dance Research Journal,
vol. 43, no. 2 [2011]: 26). See also, Franko, “Figural Inversions,” 35–51; Franko, “Archeological Choreographic Practi-
ces,” 97; Ness, “Foucault’s Turn from Phenomenology,” 19–32.
z
Foucault has defined the dispositif as a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” composed of a range of elements
such as “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid.” The dis-
positif is “the system of relations that can be established between these elements.” Michel Foucault, “The Confession
of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (1977 repr.
London: Harvester, 1980), 194. It is thus the assemblage: that which is simultaneously organized and performed. If
dispositif is commonly translated in English as “apparatus,” this would seem to underscore the mechanical and total-
izing aspect of the term at the expense of that which is proper to a “disposition”—both as arrangement and ten-
dency. “Apparatus” also emphasizes the initial, firm conditions set up by a machinery, thus somewhat overlooking
the agency or possible trajectories of its many constituents. Henceforth I retain dispositif as it most accurately
describes Foucault’s thought on subjectivity and power, as well as V
eronique Doisneau’s choreographic structure—
the nature of its critical and creative process.
 DANCE CHRONICLE 47

words, the experimenting subject here comes into being through being practiced.
The subject takes hold of his/her own practices—and of his/her life—while engag-
ing in an intimate, well-informed, and ethical choreography with apparatuses of
power, as Foucault proposes as early as 1975 in Discipline and Punish:
[S/]he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for
the constraints of power; [s/]he makes them play spontaneously on [her/]himself; [s/]he
inscribes in [her/]himself the power relation in which [s/]he simultaneously play both
roles; [s/]he becomes the principle of [her/]his own subjection.36

As the one who becomes the “principle of [her] own subjection,” Doisneau can
be seen as challenging her objectification within the Paris Opera, moving away
from her passive and ornamental function and getting hold of her stories, techni-
ques, and practices. The experimenting sujet here initiates a process of subjectiva-
tion, which departs from her assigned location onstage and alters its relation
within distinct regimes of visibility and legibility. We may further follow Foucault’s
genealogical impulse that suggests an examination of ballet’s history in the terms of
the present: to envisage the dancing body as a “history of the present” enables us to
historicize the creation of the dancing sujet across modern Western culture, under-
standing her as a mutable agent, whose movements and qualities shape the ways in
which she is apprehended across the contemporary stage.37
In V
eronique Doisneau, a whole political history is conjured up and actual-
ized; the whole history of ballet (as well as the whole story of a life) is
approached, studied, and turned inside out—becoming foreign to itself. The
choreographic sujet is here made of an intimate and yet critical assemblage,
taking shape as the performance folds multiple words, gestures, attitudes, and
speeds upon its own corporeity. Following Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, I
argue that V
eronique Doisneau creates a zone of subjectivation in which
forces, “which always come from outside,” become interior, “by being con-
verted into the nearest.”38 The performance involves a series of moves
between the historico-political sujet, the subject of choreography, the subject of
enunciation, and the experimenting subject as she practices herself. “V
eronique
Doisneau” constitutes at once an individual, a proper name, a work, a conceptual
persona—and a life. What the performance thus makes possible in this highly
codified framework is for the female dance sujet to become, through an affective
exploration that goes all over the historical and scenic dispositif and coils back
upon itself, the subject of her choreographic practices (see Figure 3).

Coda
Bel spoke of V
eronique Doisneau as being the work that initiated a shift of subject
in his oeuvre from dance itself to that which surrounds dance, moving toward “the
life of the dancer.”39 He also aligned his choreographic practice with that of the
ethnologist: “To me, the Paris Opera was like the Amazon, a completely different
48 N. SOLOMON

Figure 3. V
eronique Doisneau (2005), film by J
er^ome Bel and Pierre Dupouey, performer V
eronique
Doisneau, 37 minutes © J
er^ome Bel and Pierre Dupouey.

civilization! I went there as an ethnologist would go to meet indigenous peoples.”40

V
eronique Doisneau thus oscillates between being the object of study of the chore-
ographer-as-ethnologist, who then proceeds through a methodical analysis of its
movements and behaviors in relation to a specific milieu, to what we might call the
choreographer’s double, or conceptual persona. The dancer’s performance gives
voice, or gives body [donne corps], to Bel’s concept, so to speak, opening the way
for a dense avenue of choreographic experimentations to come. After his series of
solos, which all take on individual lives as dance subjects, Bel moved away from
the figure of the dance soloist and toward that of the collective. In his recent Dis-
abled Theater (2012), Cour d’Honneur (2013), and Gala (2015), Bel worked with
disabled performers, spectators, and amateurs, using a similar somato-linguistic
approach to choreograph the communal experiences that are constitutive, yet have
been institutionally located at the threshold, of the choreographic discipline.
My argument here has foregrounded how V
eronique Doisneau exposes the ways
in which the female dance subject is (both historically and methodologically) pro-
duced and reproduced on a global stage, while the work also opens the way for
subversion and difference. But as this work becomes a choreographic template for
a string of works that follow it, the scholar must further examine the relation
between V
eronique Doisneau and Bel’s later oeuvre, to question the nature of sin-
gularities and agencies that the work stages or actualizes. Key to this analysis will
be the relation between the individual body and the many—the singular dance
experience against the collective imaginary—that is convened quite differently in
the social and institutional scenes that Bel’s subsequent explorations approach.
Can the performance produce any variation in the grip of the disciplinary appara-
tus and the paradigm of choreographer-as-author that the woman V
eronique
Doisneau is subjected to? Despite the tight institutional spaces and operations the
 DANCE CHRONICLE 49

work exposes, perhaps what V
eronique Doisneau does, as she stands at the edges
of discursive and somatic experimentation, is to call for the radical study of a femi-
nist dance practice through its multiple utterances that de- and recompose, with
creative ingenuity and critical persistence, the historical and the contemporary, the
impersonal and the collective.

Notes


1. Brigitte Lefevre, Etudes (1952) by Harald Lander, V
eronique Doisneau (2004) by J
er^ome
Bel, Glass Pieces (1983) by Jerome Robbins [program notes], Paris National Opera, Palais
Garnier, September 22 –October 9, 2004.
ome Bel and Una Bauer, “J
er^ome Bel: An Interview,” in “Of Choreography,” eds. Ric All-
2. J
er^
sopp and Andr
e Lepecki, special issue, Performance Research, vol. 13, no. 1 (March 2008): 42.
3. J
er^
ome Bel, in Dominique Fr
etard, Le Monde 2, September 25, 2004, quoted on Bel’s web-
site: http://www.jeromebel.fr/index.php?pD2&lgD2&sD8&ctidD2&cidD147 (accessed July
31, 2017).
4. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet’s Staging of Story and Desire (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 12.
5. Ibid.
^
6. Paul Val
ery, “L’Ame et la danse,” in Œuvres, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 165; and Alain
Badiou, “La Danse comme m
etaphore de la pens
eee,” in Petit manuel d’inesth
etique (Paris:
Seuil, 1998), 91–112, my translation.
7. Paul Val
ery, “Philosophy of the Dance” [1936], in “Dance,” special issue, Salmagundi, no.
33/34 (Spring–Summer 1976), 70.
8. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, 1.
9. Bojana Kunst, “The Voice of the Dancing Body,” in “What to Affirm? What to Perform?,”
special issue, Frakcija, no. 51–52 (2009), http://wp.me/p1iVyi-1V.
10. Duc de Saint-Simon, M
emoires 1723–1750, quoted in Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A
History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 3.
11. Lettres Patentes (1661), reproduced in Marie-Jo€elle Louison-Lassabliere, Feuillets pour
Terpsichore (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 109.
12. Ibid.
13. Mark Franko, “Moliere and Textual Closure, 1661–1670,” in Dance as Text: Ideologies of
the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 110.
14. Mark Franko, “The King Cross-Dressed: Power and Force in Royal Ballets,” in From the
Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-
Century France, eds. Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1998), 68.
15. Jean-Georges Noverre, “Lettre XII,” in Lettres sur la Danse et sur les Ballets (Lyon, 1760),
315 (my translation).
16. Attributed to Louis XIV’s tutor, quoted in Homans, Apollo’s Angels, 11.
17. Mark Franko, “Figural Inversions of Louis XIV’s Dancing Body,” in Acting on the Past: His-
torical Performances Across the Disciplines, ed. Franko and Annette Richards (Middleton,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 36.

emens de la danse (Leipzig: U. C. Saalbach, 1756), quoted in Homans,
18. Charles Pauli, El

Apollo’s Angels, 21.
19. V
eronique Doisneau, V
eronique Doisneau [performance], 2004.
20. Angela Mitropoulos, Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (New York:
Minor Compositions, 2012), 117.
50 N. SOLOMON

21. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975;
repr., New York: Random House, 1995), 149.
22. “L’
ecole de danse de l’Op
era: Un peu d’histoire,” Nanterre, my translation,http://m.nan
terre.fr/1373-l-ecole-de-danse-de-l-opera.htm (accessed July 31, 2017).
23. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 141.
24. Ibid., 151.
25. Ibid., 136.
26. Ibid., 137.
27. Ibid., 139.
28. Ibid., 170.
29. Ibid., 26.
30. Michel Foucault, Dits et
ecrits 1954–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1525.
31. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 2.
32. Mark G. E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2009), 89.
33. See Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1988): 16–49.
34. Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom,” trans. Robert Hurley,
in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984; repr., New York: New Press,
1998), 281–301.
35. Ibid., 284.
36. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202.
37. Ibid., 31.
38. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Se
an Hand (1986; repr., London: Continuum, 2006), 101.
39. Bel and Bauer, “J
er^
ome Bel: An Interview,” 44.
40. J
er^
ome Bel, in Jean-Max Colard, Les inrockuptibles, September 22, 2004, quoted on Bel’s
website: http://www.jeromebel.fr/index.php?pD2&lgD2&sD8&ctidD2&cidD146 (accessed
July 31, 2017).

NOEMIE SOLOMON works as a teacher, writer, dramaturge, and curator in the field of con-
temporary performance. She edited the collections DANSE (an anthology and a catalogue,
Presses du r
eel, 2014 and 2015) that translate and put in dialogue key texts on the mutual influ-
ences of French and American choreographic cultures. She received her Ph.D. from the Depart-
ment of Performance Studies at New York University, where her dissertation, “Unworking the
Dance Subject,” was awarded the Michael Kirby Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral
Dissertation (2012). Solomon was Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at McGill University,
followed by Brown University, and is currently Program Director at the Institute for Curatorial
Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.