Chapter 3: Regina George of the 17th Century On How the Sun King Messed Us Up and the Potentials of Counterfactual History

Despite whether dance was a genuine love of Louis’, his desire for power appears to have made choreography more attractive. Lepecki notes that the invention of choreography already came about at the end of the 16th century and was not as such invented by the King.63 However, within Lepecki’s concept of choreography as that which captures dance to control its semiotic outputs. Louis’ academy systematized choreography as an apparatus, allowing him to take complete control and strictly regulate any dancing bodies and their significations, leaving his courtiers and political underlings with no agency whatsoever. Mark Franko makes a similar claim, as he conceptualizes the academy as another of Louis’ actions to bring the bodies of his courtiers under total subjugation.64 By institutionalizing choreography as an apparatus of capture, Académie Royale de Danse thus became yet another social semiotic, mean girl power tool in the King’s grand toolbox to install his desires and fictional realities (such as his own superiority) in the bodies of those under his reign. To formally recognize the academy, the King wrote a document named “Letters Patent,” which, as a choreographic law-making device, constituted new and strict regulations to govern extremely tight forms within French dance culture:

In the letters, Louis continued to describe what he considered a decay of dance within his courts, where laziness from the courtiers and gross errors in form had started infiltrating the art form. He consequently called for the academy to revive the art of dance to its initial perfection and to educate new dancers as well as re-educate the old sucky nobles. To secure this revival, the King demanded the academy be structured and administered by thirteen of his most experienced dancing masters, who would function as a sort of mean girl minion clique under the King—ruthlessly judging any newly choreographed dance that was to enter the courtly repertoire. Although these were described as “masters,” they were, in fact, within Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, more accurately positioned as “slaves.”66 As historian Maureen Needham has claimed, their foremost motivation was to uphold their privileges, prestige, and status by pleasing the desires of the King.67 Thereby laying a solid foundation for the monocultural development of European dance with no real aesthetic, political, or ideological challenge to Louis’s agenda. Dance historian Richard Powers has more generally described the purpose of the academy as being to refine, codify, and standardize dance, demanding a level of complexity and precision, aiming to make any interested practitioner (nationally and internationally) dependent on Louis’ academy as part of his vast imperial scheme.68 In other words, to monopolize cultural capital, which certainly succeeded, considering the continued position of France as a substantial cultural influencer today. 

Although the re-schooled noble dancers would continue to perform in the court ballets or a while after the foundation of Académie Royale De Danse, the academy set in motion the gradually developing trend towards a preference for “real” professional dancers. Soon, kicking out the re-schooled nobles from the court shows as they, according to the King’s advisor, Michel de Pure, were simply too stupid to keep up with the new requirements for precision and technicality.69 This eventually led to the death of the court ballets, turning ballet into a proper professionalized art form, accelerated by the foundation of the Paris Opera in 1669, as Needham states.70 What the formalization of Académie Royale de Danse and choreography as an instrument to capture the volition of dance as well as its dancers ultimately made accessible to the King. Was a high-intensity, artificial grooming of the French bodies that mattered (according to Louis). To be able to brand them as refined sculpted images and simulate a superior breed through borderline torturous methods, as the steps and significations of these dances literally demanded a complete re-sculpting of any natural anatomy by stretching, twisting, and at times even ripping apart muscles, ligaments, and bones. Methods that are still applied in the world of ballet today. It is, therefore, interesting (or disturbing) to note Louis’ description of dance as the most natural way of conditioning the body in his Letters Patent. Since ballet, as dance critic Mark Monahan has also argued, can be considered the most artificial and stylized art form still in existence,demanding physical standards that are entirely unnatural and unforgiving to any practitioner, regardless of gender.71

Académie Royale de Danse and its Colonial Connotations

While he has been looking into his own traditions, however— whether African, Caribbean or ‘show business’—he has also taken a glance at the traditions that his American colleagues of other races have been concerned with, especially the academic ballet. By and large, he has been wise enough not to be drawn into it, for its wholly European outlook, history and technical theory are alien to him culturally, temperamentally and anatomically. [...] “It is not in these dances which echo and imitate the manner of the dancers of another race that the Negro dancers are at their best, but those in which their forthrightness and simplicity have full play.72

 The quote above is from a dance review in the New York Times from 1931 by one of the first major American dance critics, John Joseph Martin. To comprehend why, Martin refers to the academic ballet as alien to non-white dancers, in addition to their natural qualities being forthrightness and simplicity. I want to take a closer look at the racist ideologies that gained momentum during the reign of Louis XIV and later crystallized in Hegel’s philosophy in “The Phenomenology of the Spirit.” Given that ballet, as an academic discipline, traces its history back to Louis’ foundation of Académie Royale De Danse, as I have argued in the previous subchapter. 

Even though the origins of race and racism will vary depending on the scholar, as political theorist Vanita Seth claims, we do find well-documented proof of racist ideologies escalating in early modern Europe, particularly during the reign of Louis XIV.73 One very potent example is Louis and Jean Baptiste Colbert’s “Le Code Noir” from 1685.74 Le Code Noir, or the Black Code as it has been translated to English, was a set of laws set in motion to constitute the regulation of every aspect of the lives of enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean colonies. From their punishments and “rights” to their living conditions and religious practices (demanding them to convert to the French catholic faith), they found definition in the code. What the laws of the code equated to was the utter dehumanization of enslaved Africans, stripping them of any fundamental human rights, altering them commodities to be circulated within the French Atlantic trade market as any other object commodity that could be sold and bought at the time. The commodification of the enslaved people was made explicitly clear in article XLIV of the code:

We declare slaves to be charges, and as such enter into community property. They are not to be mortgaged, and shall be shared equally between the co-inheritors without benefit to the wife or one particular inheritor, nor subject to the right of primogeniture, the usual customs duties, feudal or lineage charges, or feudal or seigneurial taxes.75

While Le Code Noir was explicitly enacted to manage and reduce the life capacities of enslaved Africans, we find these extreme acts of racist relational aggressions (racial exclusion) towards other indigenous cultures, too, as Louis also sought to expand his empire in North America. Historian Saliha Belmessous posits some of these accounts in her text “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy.”76 In her research, she concentrates on the French colonial settlers in New France (Canada) and their attempts at “civilizing” local indigenous populations, a process referred to as “Frenchification.” In her text Belmessous unfolds several statements from French intendants, including Jacques Duchesneau’s disappointed declaration when saying that the indigenous peoples were “hard to tame.”77 Or Antoine-Denis Raudot’s expression of confusion when realizing that out of so many nations (colonized by France), none of them seemed willing to assimilate into French customs. Instead, they insisted on the continuation of what the French viewed as uncivilized culture, perpetuating their “condition” of savagery. 

As savagery was seen as the primary obstruction of European civilization, it manifested in Louis’ French colonial policies as a significant concern as unfolded by Belmessous. The idea of savagery, rooted in anxieties towards untamed nature, finds resonance in Achille Mbembes’s essay “Necropolitics” (2003),78 in which he draws from Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of the Spirit,” published approximately a century after the death of Louis.79 Despite the time difference, I believe that Hegel’s theories offer insights into the legitimization of the seventeenth century French colonial policies. Especially when comprehending Hegel’s linkages between subjectivity and racialized nature and its role in dehumanizing the colonized indigenous and African populations as part of Louis’ all- encompassing imperial ambitions. 

Mbembe locates Hegel’s conception of death as central to becoming a human subject, describing death as a two-part negation: initially, the human need to negate nature by attempting to transform and reduce it to their own needs. Subsequently, the human transforms this negated nature through work and struggle and, through this process, create their own world while also confronting their own negativity. According to Mbembe’s reading, this leads Hegel to believe that human death is essentially a voluntary act by way of one’s willingness to consciously risk the death of one’s inner animal nature, considered by Hegel to be inherent in all human beings. In its essence, a human can first attain a subject status, once willing to kill their inner animal and emancipate themselves from nature. Hegel’s idea of subjectivity entails severe racial implications, to the extent of it being fair to integrate him into Louis’s patriarchal mean-girl clique. According to Hegel, only Europeans possessed the willingness to confront their own animal death and assert control over nature. In opposition, he believed the colonized African and indigenous populations to lack the same willingness, evidenced by their reluctance to adopt European understandings of civilization. Consequently, dismissing them to an eternal state of animality, also described as savagery. As I have mentioned earlier, Hegel’s philosophy appears to mirror the colonial policies of Louis’ seventeenth century France. This is exemplified by statements such as those by Louis’ intendants, Jacques Duchesneau and Antoine-Denis Raudot, who expressed disbelief in the rejection of French customs by the indigenous population of New France. In addition to Le Code Noir’s transparent dehumanization of enslaved Africans. These policies were, of course, not isolated to France, as similarities could be found in most other European colonial states as well.

To bring this discourse back into Louis’ obsession with dance, I want to recall his capturing of dance as an aesthetic semiotic weapon to further his cultural and imperial power, in addition to Monahan’s description of ballet as the most artificial and stylized art form.80 A conflation of these two ideas might enable us to start identifying how the racially divisive fiction of subject versus animal possibly manifested itself in Louis’s design of a new European dance culture, amounting to an absolute act of mean girl aggression through an aesthetic promotion of racial superiority.

Suppose we assume that the supreme expression of racial superiority within the realm of Louis’ France grounded itself in one’s willingness to emancipate oneself from nature and thus become civilized, i.e., reducing nature to one’s needs, or subscribing to artificiality to put it differently. The logic behind the King’s seemingly intense desire to construct artificial worlds around him may start to reveal itself. This desire can be traced to multiple components of his reign, such as Versailles and its hyper-designed gardens, his excessive, non-practical fashions, strict social etiquettes, etc. As a side note, I would even speculate that if he had had the chance to design the architecture of Paris with contemporary technologies, it would likely have looked like a new Dubai on steroids. However, the racially motivated logic behind his desire for artificiality also seems to elucidate why European dance culture, specifically the ballet, arrived at what Monahan describes as entirely artificial corporeal aesthetics. As I have previously argued, there was nothing natural about the dances developed by Louis and his dance masters. Every single step was entirely inorganic, opposing any natural flow of movement within a human body (something that has only intensified in its extremities after his death). These dances, therefore, implied the necessity to denaturalize the body of the dancer through elements such as opening the hips, over-stretching ligaments, and twisting the knees and ankles, relying on what can best be described as extraordinarily intense and painful training methods. Therefore, it seems fitting to speculate that Louis might have realized dance as an ideal setting within which to construct, perform, and promote France’s embodied superiority through the aesthetic extremities of his dancer’s bodily artifice. Or through what Mbembe describes as Hegel’s death project being a two-part negation, that first, the human negates nature and second, transforms it to their own need through work and struggle. Translating to the denaturalization of the dancer’s bodies (negating nature) through unnatural, intense training methods (work and struggle). Although these racialized logics, escalated in early modern Europe by mean girl Louis XIV, employed to promote him and his nation’s superiority, was arguably a complete fiction. They have, nonetheless, naturalized arguments like those expressed by dance critic John Joseph Martin, as cited in the beginning of this subchapter, when stating that non-white dancers do not belong within the academic ballet, as they have been pillaged from human subjectivity and dumped into an eternal state of animality. Indicating that, the academic ballet is ultimately a space for the performance of white “superior” bodies. A problem that seems to be ever more present in the world of ballet today, which I will unfold in the next part. To make full sense of these arguments and Louis’ obsessive desire to capture the semiotic field of dance. I want to recall Gretchen Schmid’s case of the immense social and cultural power of dance during the seventeenth century as a crucial lens through which to read this theory. As our marginal relationship to professionalized dance in most Western communities today, might render them obscure or hard to grasp.81

The Spectral Immortality of Louis XIV

Even though ghosts can often be felt as eerie, immaterial entities from the past, constraining our capacities to exist within the world, they are usually challenging to locate and give language to, as they no longer present themselves as living matter. This might suggest that we need to find alternative ways of confronting them. In this section, I will argue Louis to be one of these slippery beings, as his influence is still felt within extensive domains of European dance culture.

In 1997, sociologist Avery Gordon developed an influential theory on hauntings and ghostly presences in her book “Ghostly Matters,” describing Haunting as “a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.”82 In Ghostly Matters, Gordon proposes a non-superstitious examination of ghosts and how the past, particularly its unresolved traumas and injustices, continue to exert influence on the present, a concept commonly described as hauntology. Hauntology refers to the ways in which the specters of history can still be felt as immaterial forces in everyday life. These specters disrupt the present and remind us of the unresolved issues and inequalities that persist. Gordon’s hauntology highlights the need to engage with and address these specters, as they offer opportunities for reflection, critique, and the potential for transformative change. Based on her conception of hauntology, I want to construct a space within this thesis in which it is possible to name and confront the spectrality of Louis XIV, as he seems to still be thriving as an immortal figure 300 years after his death. Throughout my research, I have been disturbed to find his contributions to European dance culture interpreted by historians through almost exclusive and overtly generous bias. This may signify, based on my claims in the former subchapter, that his contributions have been de-historicized. Described by scholars Mohaiminul Islam and Shubhankar Roy, as the dangerous path of unconsciously separating historical events from their context, leading to distorted or incomplete narrations of a particular past.83 What these generous accounts additionally imply, seen through Gordon’s hauntology, is a lack of confrontation with the past injustices performed by the Sun King. To start naming him, I have, previously, tried to re-historicize a part of his artistic legacy, complexifying the context out of which he developed his academy and the dances belonging to that genealogy. At this point, I want to bring this history into a contemporary context by pointing to four different strands, through which I claim Louis’ eerie presence can still be felt:

1. Through the continued performance of white superiority within dance.
2. Through Adesola Akinleye and Ingri Fiksdal’s discussions on the division between dance as art and non-art.
3. Through Neoplatonist matter and the aesthetics of whiteness in the classical ballet.
4. And through architecture and economy.

By tracing his ghost within these domains, I aim to establish a groundwork from which we again can start to locate him in a somewhat material form through living bodies and monumental architectures (maybe even possessed), to recover his mortality. Finding non-white dancers in Western ballet companies (as ballet has expanded way beyond Europe since the death of Louis XIV) is a new and still a rare vision. In 2020, the first ever black ballerina with Staatsballett Berlin, shortly after being fired under the argument of being more fit for a smaller company. Chloé Lopes Gomes gave an interview to the Guardian, unfolding some of the racist relational aggressions she had to endure during her time with the company.84 These aggressions included one of the company teachers expressing the mistake she thought it was to hire Gomes, as a black woman would spoil the white aesthetics of the company, denying Gomes a white costume since it would look wrong on a black body, and later forcing her to powder her skin white, to fit in with the rest of the dancers. Sadly, experiences like these, mediated by Gomes come across as stereotypical for present-day ballet companies, as they have been echoed by many non-white dancers in companies all over the world. Among these are American dancer and activist Misty Copeland’s criticisms of the world of ballet, stating that the darker your skin, the more you will have to endure.85 Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness”86 to explain the conflict this puts racialized dancers in by having to choose between a black or white identity, as to achieve one necessarily means to fail the other.87 Racialized dancers, once rarely allowed into these companies, are therefore left with a binary choice, similar to the assimilationist project we saw in New France under Louis XIV. Either learn to perform a white identity and accept to be governed by a white culture or leave. In this sense, the fiction of white superiority installed through Louis’ racist policies and later naturalized and perpetuated by Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit” is indeed still alive within Western ballet, not only in Europe but on a vaster scale.88 This brings to mind a discussion brought forth by Dr. Adesola Akinleye on the division between “cultural” and “communal” dance versus dance codified as “high art,” the latter referring to the formalized dance genres with roots in Louis’ Académie Royale De Danse.89 Akinleye argues that this division is caused by the cultish nature of “high art” dance genres, such as the classical ballet, where, upon entry, volition is left by the door and the process of integration (training), is based solely on the philosophy of imitating the body and mind of your teacher. According to Akinleye, this propagates an unquestioning culture, withdrawn from criticality, thus breeding a fertile ground for ignorant re-productions of whatever system or belief is already instated. As I have previously examined, this specific culture of subjugation within dance, stripping the dancer of a critical mind and volition, draws straight genealogical lines back to Louis and his application of choreography to capture any pre-existing agency of the dancer to compose its semiotic outlets meticulously.

Dance scholar Ingri Fiksdal has recently expanded on Akinleye’s discussions through her critique of the term “contemporary” within contemporary dance, as this poses as a container encompassing all present-day dance genres but, in practice, seems to refer exclusively to the dance genres affiliated with the genealogy of dance as “high-art.”90 Consequentially, a hierarchy is created through which traditional, cultural, ritual, and folkloric genres are dumped as primitive dances in the past. In contrast, high-art dance genres continue to enjoy beneficial access to formal education, art funding, and networks of dissemination and distribution, as pointed out by Fiksdal. Again, A culture that can be traced back to Louis’ transformation of communal dances (the pre-baroque folk dances turned into court ballets and later institutionalized by Académie Royale de Danse as “high art”). What one could also locate here is how the ghost of Louis keeps being re-born into new, contemporary minions who, because of de-historization and uncritical bodily imitations, keep reproducing the institutional system and beliefs instated through Académie Royale de Danse in the seventeenth century.

Neoplatonist matter and the aesthetics of whiteness

Much of modern Western dance and, in particular, its foundation, the classical ballet, is notoriously tied to aesthetics of ethereality, lightness, verticality, and elevation. Aesthetics that, in other ways, could be described as divine or beyond human aesthetics. Inscribed into the very fabric of the dances originating from the court of Louis XIV, these aesthetics manifest themselves in multiple ways. It is not coincidental that most steps noted in the balletic vocabulary are to be executed on the toes, distributing the body’s weight to the front rather than back on the heels to express weightlessness. And, In the case of female dancers, on point, enabled by the newer invention of point shoes, elevating the dancer as close as humanly possible above the ground. In any performance, there is no singular moment in which the body relaxes and turns into heavy flesh. It is constantly held by activating every muscle to prevent itself from resembling inert matter. It is vertically elongated, the neck stretched away from the shoulders, the torso lifted from sinking into the hips, and the feet extended to their balls, serving a constant illusion of floating beyond the ground when moving in space via small and, at times, almost invisible steps. The arms of the dancer never hang loose in a natural manner but are always activated and move in half-circular shapes (if not stretched into the horizon as if reaching for the sky) to convey airy and God-like images. In other words, the primary task of the dancer is to discipline their skeleton, flesh, and muscles to the extent of gaining the ability to perform the illusion of their body ascending beyond its earthly limitations.

The aesthetics of classical ballet today is, of course, a highly escalated version of what we see in the early modern dances under Louis XIV. However, when holding these dances up against each other, it is clear that they operate with the same encoded system, a system in which the desire for the disembodied human to turn into an ethereal being is vital. It is a disembodiment tied to the desire to reach a divine spark, to elevate the human beyond itself as fleshy matter and, therefore, earthly constraints. To understand why this aesthetic came to be, we need to go further back in time and look at the Neoplatonist binary between lightness and darkness and its relation to matter, as the not-yet articulated concept of race would later be built on these associations. 

Neoplatonist philosophy believed that humanity’s real nature was divine and that the only access to the divine was through the illumination of the mind, aesthetically encoded via the symbol of the sun and gold, the sun being the element illuminating the mind from above. Because of this, the mind was seen as the ultimate cause of everything as opposed to the body, which was considered inert matter, nothing but a container for the mind, a dead entity bound heavily to the earth. Neoplatonism, therefore, also connected matter to the causation of evil, meaning that one should not fixate on one’s flesh as this would corrupt the soul, meaning one’s access to the divine mind. Through this, Neoplatonism created the binary in which intellect, elevation, light, divinity, and evolution became associated in opposition to the association of matter with darkness, evil, and devolution. Later, this philosophy would lay the foundation for the conception of race, in which white bodies became synonymous with the former – intellect, lightness, divinity, evolution, and elevation. And non-white bodies with the latter – heavy, earthbound, inert matter and devolution. Therefore, Neoplatonist philosophy, elucidates how whiteness is inscribed into the very fundament of modern European dance culture, by explaining Louis’ obsession with the sun, divine power, and his production of white, ethereal bodies within dance. Moreover, it is intriguing to observe contemporary perceptions of European dance as practices of embodiment. Considering, that these physical practices may be founded on principles of disembodiment, given that, the object of Louis’ dances was to de-flesh and transcend the corporeal limitations of the white body, allowing it to ascend from itself as inert matter.

When Monuments Must Fall

Louis’ architectural and financial legacy within dance is rather transparent and, for that reason, easy to trace, as it manifests itself in monumental opera houses and funding systems all over the Western world. While tracing his ghost, I therefore recently became curious to know what his exact funding status currently looks like. Through official documents published in Norway, I have found that out of its total budget of approximately 80 000 000 € in 2022, the Norwegian Opera House (the house of the ballet) received 67 000 000 € directly from the government.91 This amounts to a staggering 84% of their grand budget. It should also be noted that this budget does not include the state funding thrown into significant renovations of the opera house (or, as was the case in Norway between 2003-2008, to build an entirely new house). To put these numbers into perspective, I did a similar search on the budget of the Norwegian Cultural Fund, which is the government membrane established to fund the totality of the free Norwegian art scene (most of the art production in Norway), including the fields of theater, dance, music, literature, cultural preservation, research, art criticism, journals, and other publications, in addition to institutions not on the state budget, such as independent art festivals. I found that this fund amounts to just below 83,000,000 €, exposing that the Norwegian Opera House alone constitutes a strikingly similar amount to the totality of what the free art scene needs to survive on.92 Unfortunately, these budgets are not isolated to Norway, as I find similar government contributions to other European Opera houses, such as the Paris Opera receiving approximately 100,000,000 € from the French government,93 La Scala in Milan receiving 86,000,000 €,94 The Royal Danish Theater receiving 71,000,000 €, and so on.95

Although most of the opera houses mentioned here tend to complain about poor funding from their governments, their numbers do not exactly support such complaints. What these numbers, in fact, explicitly lay bare is the eager and excessive support of reproducing Louis’ artistic pollution, operating under the alibi of being a high-cultural legacy. In addition, they also seem to point our attention towards the issue of governments showing more interest in preserving history rather than producing new histories with the capacity to encompass the bodies currently inhabiting the world.

In 2020, when the global Black Lives Matter demonstrations re-ignited following the brutal police murder of George Floyd, Paul Preciado wrote a text in defense of tearing down public colonial monuments, writing:

[...] statues are ghosts of the past, petrified in order to arouse adoration and respect, reverence and fear, exaltation and obedience. They are oversized collective ex-votos, prostheses of historical memory that memorialize the lives of those deemed important, that preserve the bodies that deserve to be “statuefied.”96

While an opera house might not take the literal shape of a personified statue, it could certainly be argued that it inhabits the shape of a public colonial monument—one that represents a multitude of bodies deserving of memorialization, as Preciado described, especially the body of Louis XIV. Preciado continues his arguments for tearing down public monuments, stating that “we collectively inhabit an iconic landscape that is saturated with signs of power endorsed by historical and epic narratives and aestheticized and naturalized to the extent that we are no longer able to perceive their cognitive violence.”97 Opera houses all over the West, with their historical narrative of being a high-art legacy and belonging to some fictionalized superior human breed, appear to have the same seductive effect as the one suggested by Preciado. We simply seem to have lost sight of the violence performed by these architectures, or maybe, this was a sight we never even had in the first place, due to selective historical memory and de-historicized narratives. So, instead of participating in activities instigated by these colonial monuments, we might spend our time better by plotting on how to tear them down, physically and historically.