ABSTRACT
The methodological development of progressive human and animal dressage practices reaches a peak by the end of the eighteenth century. To provide a critical historical context for why artists have critiqued established dressage practices through their embodied animalities in the aesthetic form of their dancing horse performances since the 1960s, this chapter presents a critical cross-reading of the development of three body-based artistic performance practices (l'art militaire, the manège, and Chorégraphie) in absolutist France. Drawing on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectics of Enlightenment, and Adorno's aesthetic theory, this chapter analyses the pre-modern dressage mechanisms of these performance practices in a monarchical political system, at a time when the military was not yet professionalised, horses still had a use-value due to the importance they played during wartime as well as in artistic performances, and the vocabulary of dance had not yet fully developed into romantic ballet.
