Dancing against History: (The Royal) Ballet, Forsythe, Foucault, Brecht, and the BBC

Abstract

On 5 July 1997, The Royal Ballet danced William Forsythe's Steptext as part of a final programme at its Royal Opera House home before the theatre closed for an extensive Millennial programme of rebuilding. Filmed by the BBC, the performance was televised as part of the 1997 Christmas schedule. This paper explores the striking parallels between the institutional critique staged by Steptext and the literal deconstruction which the Royal Opera House was about to undergo. It considers how the programme debated Covent Garden as British cultural institution just as the reconstruction of the Royal Opera House was imminent. Focusing first on Steptext's post-structuralist desire to excavate, disrupt, and disavow the apparently logical structures which have shaped the governing institutions of western performance, it moves to consider how the BBC programme makers co-opted, and extended to the fabric of the Royal Opera House itself, ballet's same potential to critique its own institutional history enshrined in Steptext. Having argued that Brecht might be an especially apt ally in Forsythe's realisation, through performance, of some of the fundamental tenets of Foucauldian theory, those relating to Foucault's re-conceptualisation of history especially, this paper moves finally to propose the performance and televisual adaptation of Steptext as a portal into new modes of reading the post-war Royal Ballet as Foucauldian subjugated, or effective, history.