University of Roehampton
‘So you see, the story was not quite as you were told’: Maleficent, Dance, Disney, and Cynicism as the choreo-philosophical critique of neoliberal precarity Helena Hammond Abstract:Dance bequeaths a conflicted legacy for resisting neoliberalism: the same portfolio careers; pick-up companies; and freelance working practices through which the artist-entrepreneur negotiates and survives the exigencies of the neoliberal market have themselves been co-opted by neoliberal economics as blueprints for labour practices in ways unimagined and never intended by arts practitioners. ‘The freelancer’ to quote Lauren Berlant (76) ‘is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism’. Looking beyond dance’s unwitting complicity in the neoliberal contracting of the body, this paper focuses on dance as an emergent critical aesthetics that calls attention to the incorporation of the geopolitical by the post-statist neoliberal project. Its case study is Maleficent (2014), the Angelina Jolie popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of Sleeping Beauty’s slighted fairy Carabosse. Maleficent’s status as dance intertext is many-faceted: its titular character’s conjunction of malevolence and magnificence and the sourcing of her predicament to an originating act of socio-economic disenfranchisement are familiar from the characterisation of Carabosse in Marius Petipa’s choreography for the ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Unspecified in the ballet, this act is elaborated in the film: ‘the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a kingdom which needed neither king nor queen’ to quote the film’s narration, Maleficent is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act, betokening rape for Jolie, renders Maleficent’s aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; everyday and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies, must substitute more mundane mime in their place. This paper begins by establishing the strong bonds which bind Disney to dance; the extent to which, to quote Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, ‘the art of animation…has its forerunner in ballet…At least in Fokine’s ballets for Diaghilev...’. Drawing on analyses of neoliberalism, those of David Harvey in particular, this paper then moves to consider Maleficent as the articulation of a critique of neoliberalism, one which – it will be suggested – relies heavily on Cynic philosophy for its formulation. Cynic philosophy, especially in the extended consideration of the Cynic life presented by Michel Foucault’s final series of Collège de France lectures will be critically important here. Arguing for Maleficent as the choreography of Feminist ethics in response to neoliberal policies that render human relations to the land ever more ethno-biologically precarious, this paper will point up the strong parallels that exist between the film and Cynic thinking. In Foucault’s account, Cynicism especially prioritises the vie autre (other life). This makes Cynicism particularly effective as a vehicle for questioning neoliberal values and proposing others in their place. Maleficent’s critique will be shown to be choreo-philosophical in the sense that it mobilises, and is highly reliant upon, a range of dance histories - those to do with The Sleeping Beauty especially - and dance practices, particularly those bound up, ultimately, with pantomime dance in Hellenistic ancient Greece. This article will suggest that pantomime dance as a close, cognate ally of Cynic philosophy, was already imbued, in some significant sense, with philosophical intent. It is pantomime dance’s philosophical intent - this paper argues - that endures and is mobilised to such effect in the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent. Attention then turns to Alain Badiou’s concept of cinema as philosophy. This article will suggest both that Badiou’s concept is more indebted to dance than is generally acknowledged, and that it arguably strengthens the sorts of claims that can be made for Maleficent as choreo-philosophical critique. This paper also proposes, in a similar vein, that on the basis of his reading of Cynicism as actually highly motile, the late Foucault is more phenomenological in orientation and - so it would follow - less antithetical to dance and its study, than has hitherto been suggested. Keywords: The Sleeping Beauty (ballet), Maleficent; Carabosse; pantomime dance; Disney animation; Michel Foucault; Cynic Philosophy; Neoliberalism; David Harvey; land grab; enclosure; pedestrianism; gender politics; Alain Badiou; Charles Perrault; Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘Let us tell an old story anew and we will see how well you know it…So you see, the story was not quite as you were told.’ The lines of narration which respectively open and close Maleficent, screenplay for the film written by Linda Woolverton.‘One thing is certain: the only way to be faithful to a classic work is to take such a risk: avoiding it, sticking to the traditional letter, is the safest way to betray the spirit of the classic. In other words the only way to keep a classical work alive is to treat it as ‘open’, as pointing towards the future; or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classic work were a film requiring a chemical for development which is invented after the fact. In this manner, it is only today that we can get the full picture.’ Slavoj ?i?ek, discussing ‘numerous recent attempts to stage classical operas not only by transposing them into a different (most often contemporary) era but also by changing some basic facts of the narrative itself’, ‘Afterword by Slavoj ?i?ek’, pp. 161-225, in Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner, London: Verso, 2010 p. 172. This paper is concerned with Maleficent (2014), Angelina Jolie’s popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of The Sleeping Beauty ballet’s slighted fairy, Carabosse. The first part of this discussion identifies the film’s potential for critique of neoliberalism. Thematically speaking, this is seen to rest, especially, with Maleficent’s mobilization of the intertwined themes of sexual violence, war, land grab, and labour, female labour in particular. If neoliberalism depends upon fundamental changes in discursive formations in order to succeed, as Maurizio Lazzarato (2009) and others have suggested, this begs the question of how cultural representations, among other discursive practices, might operate as sites ‘from which’, according to Raewyn Connell, ‘the neoliberal project can effectively be confronted and perhaps turned back’ (Connell: 35). The discussion which follows nominates Maleficent, in its insistence on values that resist and call into question some of neoliberalism’s founding precepts, as arguably one such site. Consequently, while this paper remains alert to Maleficent’s shortcomings where articulations of race, ethnicity, and class are concerned, the discussion that follows is as committed to exploring those dimensions which might account for the film’s efficacy as affect work. In this respect, this paper’s particular and enduring concern is with the way in which Maleficent’s searching analysis of neoliberalism is heavily dependent on dance. Indeed, so indebted is Maleficent to dance, this article argues, that the process of analysis which it sets in motion can best be understood as one of choreo-philosophical critique. It is Maleficent’s status as choreo-philosophical critique which is the central focus of the second part of this article. In this context, special emphasis will be placed on the legacy of Cynic philosophy in and for dance; on its import for The Sleeping Beauty ballet and Maleficent in particular. Attention here will turn to Foucauldian analysis of Cynic thinking in order to demonstrate that Maleficent, taking its cue from The Sleeping Beauty’s Carabosse, is strongly marked by a conjunction of dance and Cynic (philosophical) values and practices. Demonstrating Maleficent’s indebtedness to Cynic philosophy also helps this article make the case for dance practices and Cynic values - already close cognates of one another - when they are so conjoined, as a particularly effective frame for analysing neoliberalism. For the Cynic privileging – in Foucault’s eyes - of the vie autre supports alternative conceptualisations of economic wealth creation and distribution in place of neoliberal ones. On these grounds, then, Maleficent can take its place alongside other strands of (dance) performance, (cinema) art, and literature which, in calling attention to neoliberalism’s precarity effect - its instigation of a ‘micro-politics of insecurity’ to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s term - might work eventually to resist and so ease that effect. As the editors of Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee take seriously, and in terms not dissimilar to those of Raewyn Connell already cited, ‘the potential…of the conditions of activism, which, despite commodification and bowdlerization in the neoliberal era, also reveals itself as a productive force for politics and the constitution of critical subjectivities and solidarities.’ (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee: 5). Recognition of ‘the lurking promise of political resistance within the bounds of commodified popular and mainstream media’, is intrinsic to Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee’s investigation of ‘social action [that] is increasingly styled by and manifest through commercialized popular culture’ (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee: 4-5). There are, of course, tensions inherent in this distinctly non-Jamesonian investment in, and recognition of, commercialized popular culture’s activist potential. It seems especially relevant to acknowledge these given the authors’ commitment to ‘re-evaluate Marxist theories of social power and resistance…to think[] through the consolidation of commodity activism precisely as it redefines material histories of capitalist power, identity construction, and resistance’ (Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee: 4). Yet despite these tensions, their study is relevant for considering Maleficent. This would anyway be the case in view of Maleficent’s popular culture status. It seems especially so given that the ‘social activist programs’ of Jolie and of her then husband, Brad Pitt, respectively merit individual chapter-length case studies (Trope; Fox Gotham, in Weiser and Mukherjee) in their collection. Part One: Maleficent: Dance, Disney, and Neoliberal PrecarityLike shooting fish in a barrel? Disney: historiography, hegemony, and neoliberalismThis is arguably a particularly interesting juncture at which to research and write on the dialogue between dance and Disney. Through Maleficent, this complex, nuanced, and enduring dialogue with dance continues, shaping and informing the contemporary Disney legacy film. Maleficent, released in 2014, can be termed one such Disney legacy film; a new phenomenon involving the remaking of classic Disney fairy tale animations as non-animated, live-action feature films: Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh, would follow in 2015; Beauty and the Beast, directed by Bill Condon, in 2017. Significantly, the Disney legacy film has emerged as a category side by side with populist film and television treatments that enact and enable at least some degree of meta-reflection on the fraught, discriminatory history and working practices that form part of the historic legacies of the Disney enterprise. Saving Mr Banks (2013), featuring Emma Thompson as Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers arguably stands in this vein: The film offers - at least to some extent - a subjugated history, given its focus on the unsung female labour underpinning the Disney enterprise. In the US, the PBS broadcast of the ‘American Experience’ two-part Walt Disney documentary in 2015, anticipating the 2016 50th anniversary of Walt Disney’s death, is another example. In the UK, Disney commemoration has taken a somewhat different course in the run up to this landmark anniversary. A chief example of this alternative reflection on the Disney legacy is Dismaland, an apocalyptic riff on Disneyland erected in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare in the summer of 2015. Featuring a ‘dilapidated Disney castle towering over Banksy’s “bemusement park”’ (Luke: 35), Dismaland overtly referenced the 1959 Disney Sleeping Beauty animation since Disney’s cinematic logo, in recent iterations, is a ‘mash-up of the Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty castle dominat[ing] a pastoral landscape dotted with lights’ (Cecire: 245). Once dismantled, the bemusement park’s ‘leftover crew’, to quote Dismaland’s website, ‘were recycled into aid workers. They’ve since travelled to the Calais migrant camp, and so far have completed 12 dwellings, a community centre… and a children’s play park’ Dismaland’s website informed. That is, until the Calais camp was itself dismantled in autumn 2016. Maleficent might be aligned with this more self-reflexive strand of popular culture engagement with the Disney legacy. According to Deconstructing Disney authors Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan, who in turn quote Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, authors of a landmark study on Disney and right wing politics, ‘as early as 1971…“attacking Disney [wa]s no novelty”’ (Byrne and McQuillan: 1). And this critique of what Byrne and McQuillan term ‘the right-wing agenda more or less implicit in Disney films’(Byrne and McQuillan: 1) has endured, in studies such as Elizabeth Bell et al’s From Mouse to Mermaid, on which the present discussion will indeed draw. The comprehensiveness of this critique suggests that there is little more that can usefully be added where Disney and cultural imperialism are concerned. Yet, as Byrne and McQuillan say of the post-1989 feature-length Disney animations on which they focus, their interest in these films lies less with ‘naming and shaming individuals’ and more ‘with the totality of a system which puts in play a set of privileged ideological operators only to have them returned against that system by the text which it produces’ (Byrne and McQuillan: 20). Critical response to Maleficent similarly suggests that this film cannot be wholly subsumed within a dominant reading of Disney as entirely the hegemonic articulation of purely imperialist cultural interests. The Guardian’s Charlie Lyne praised Maleficent for its ‘metatextual postmodernism’ (Lyne: 23); for The Independent’s Geoffrey Macnab, Maleficent is ‘a knowing and witty reinvention of an old fairy tale that looks as if it owes much to Marina Warner and Angela Carter (and to Jolie’s own celebrity status and story)’ (Macnab: 37); and The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey found Jolie ‘freer and funnier than she has ever been on screen’, so that Maleficent is ‘a textbook example of how to engineer a comeback’ (Gilbey: 12). Even two years after its release, and as this article is being finished, Maleficent is still garnering plaudits as ‘that genuinely feminist film’ in critical reception of The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016) (O’Sullivan: 35). The latter, according to reviewers, draws heavily on the ‘origin-story-come-sequel’ format so familiar from Maleficent but with none of the intelligence which many critics were quick to see as so manifest in the Jolie film. Viewed in this light, and in the context of what, for the purposes of this article will be termed Critical Disney Studies (CDS), Maleficent can be seen to contribute to the articulation of a ‘feminine cinematics’ (Bainbridge: 62). In proposing this term, Caroline Bainbridge draws on Luce Irigaray’s thinking on the role of mediation in the construction of female subjectivity, in order to understand the cinema screen as constituting a membrane as ‘a means of establishing the importance of forms of mediation for the female subject’ (Bainbridge: 46). In this context, Bainbridge has ‘contemporary women’s cinema’ specifically in mind, that is, films ‘directed by women, produced independently of Hollywood studios and [which] share a concern with matters of female subjectivity’ (Bainbridge: 66). And yet, as will be seen, Maleficent, despite its Disney credentials nonetheless qualifies, in some significant ways, as contemporary women’s cinema: Indeed, one mark of its indexing to ballet’s version of Sleeping Beauty is the extent to which Maleficent, too, has a female-dominated cast and origins which lie in a female-centric fable. It also has a female screenwriter. Cinema’s female spectator-subject, an area of special focus for Bainbridge’s notion of feminine cinematics, is as intrinsically bound up with Maleficent. The film was one of the top five highest grossing films of 2014 and Jolie’s ‘biggest box office debut to date’, taking $70m (?41m) at the US box office in its first weekend. The BBC understood Maleficent’s popular success in gendered terms, as that of a ‘woman’s film pushing the all-male action film, X-Men: Days of Future off the number 1 slot’ (BBC, 2014a). Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw saw things similarly, writing of how Maleficent succeeded in ‘smacking those uppity X-Men down to second place at the US box office’ (Bradshaw: 8). Cartoons as ‘screen ballet’: Maleficent, The Sleeping Beauty, Disney and DanceThe conjunction of malevolence and magnificence in the name given to the film’s titular character - etymologically her name is the adjective deriving from maleficia, meaning ‘particular harms inflicted [by a person] on individuals’ (Demos: 21) - declares from the outset the movie’s status as a reimagining ‘of Sleeping Beauty [told] from the point of view of the [Disney] villainess’ (Macnab: 37). That is, of Maleficent, the evil, and therefore much maligned fairy in Disney’s 1959 animated feature-length Sleeping Beauty. This 1959 Disney animation was, in its turn, heavily indebted to the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, as evidenced by the film’s reliance on key sections of Tchaikovsky’s ballet score, ‘unblushingly pinched by Disney [from the composer]’, as Anthony Lane puts it (Lane: 110), for its musical soundtrack. The legacy of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty comes down through to Maleficent via the latter’s retention, as theme song, of Once Upon a Dream from the 1959 animation. Once Upon a Dream re-works the Garland Waltz which Tchaikovsky wrote for The Sleeping Beauty’s first act, in effect the ballet’s second act given its prologue plus three acts format. In the ballet, this waltz functions as a transgenerational massing of the fairy tale kingdom’s peasant third estate, assembled in the palace grounds in tribute to Aurora’s coming of age. Newly equipped with Disney lyrics, by Sammy Fain and Jack Lawrence, the waltz is danced as a pivotal duet by Aurora and the Prince in the 1959 animation, so that it fixes that film’s romantic settlement. The Garland Waltz endures also in Lana Del Rey’s interpretation of Once Upon a Dream as the Maleficent theme tune. Re-expressed by Del Rey in a more disturbingly Gothic minor key, the song no longer harmonises hegemonic values of class or gender. In fact, for feminist philosopher Nina Power, Del Rey’s Money, Power, Glory, released only a year after Maleficent and ‘ostensibly about a hypocritical religious figure, could just as easily be read as a feminist or reparations revenge anthem’ (Power, 2014) . Online fan postings recognise Del Rey’s Once Upon a Dream as Maleficent’s theme song, in similar terms. Dance in general, and ballet in particular, have been recognized, through the work of several scholars, but particularly that of Esther Leslie, as primary aesthetic drivers for Walt Disney’s feature-length animations. The leading early Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, a one-time admirer of early Disney cartoons due to their avant-gardist aesthetics, even likened the animator to a choreographer, exclaiming that ‘Disney is the brilliant master and unsurpassed genius in the creation of audiovisual equivalents in music of the independent movement of lines and a graphic interpretation of the inner flow of the music (more of the melody than of the rhythm!)’ (Eisenstein quoted in Leslie: 248; italics are his). Viewed ‘according to Eisenstein’s logic [Daria Khitrova maintains], Fokine and Diaghilev are, in a sense, “forerunners” of Walt Disney…As he later explained in his book of memoirs, dancing and drawing were inseparable twins’ (Khitrova: 83). As Leslie has also shown, Igor Stravinsky similarly admired Disney, especially in light of Disney’s animation to accompany part of the composer’s Ballets Russes Rite of Spring ballet score, for inclusion in Fantasia (1940). Stravinsky visited Disney’s Californian Burbank studios to check how this work was progressing in 1939, declaring to Time Magazine the following year that ‘Disney’s palaeontological cataclysm was what he had in mind all along in The Rite of Spring’ (Leslie: 166-167). This success prompted Stravinsky to sell Disney an option on three more pieces, even if the professional relationship between the two men would eventually sour (Leslie: 166-167). As Leslie also points out, figures writing on, or working in, dance in the 1930s, went to similar lengths to stress the Disney-ballet conjunction:‘[Jean] Prevost [writing in 1938] note[d] that the [Disney cartoon series] Silly Symphonies are precursors of a new kind of art-music form similar to opera or ballet, but with much greater possibilities than both of those…Adrian Stokes compares classical ballet and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse in his book Tonight the Ballet. Anthony Asquith in an essay on filming ballet in 1936 cites Disney’s Silly Symphonies as an example of “ballet constructed in film terms”. In 1934 Arnold Haskell’s Balletomania claimed that “Mickey Mouse seems to provide the ballet need on film; a strong personality artificially created out of a pattern. Musically, too, it would be difficult to imagine a more perfect screen ballet”.’ (Leslie: 104). Where particular feature-length Disney animations are concerned, these points of interconnection between ballet and Disney have been traced by Elizabeth Bell. According to Bell ‘the constructed bodies of the young women in Disney’s three earliest tales…are not drawn in prosaic strokes of cartoon corporeality, but in the formal and poetic lines of classical ballet…the entire [1959] film of Sleeping Beauty was filmed in live action before [being] drawn’, so that ‘the markers of class…are covertly embodied in the metaphors of classical dance. Royal lineage and bearing are personified in the erect, ceremonial carriage of ballet…[to the extent that] classical dance carriage and royal bearing are interchangeable in Disney animation…’ (Bell: 52).Bell stresses how this identification with ballet was not restricted to female characters: ‘In the Disney landscape, the dancing heroines are partnered by the silent ciphers of nineteenth-century classical ballet…Indeed Disney is reported to have chosen dancer Louis Hightower to model for [Cinderella’s] Prince Charming’ (Bell: 53). Dance-trained Helene Stanley served as the live-action model for Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty, with surviving dance footage of her performing on the models stage for the latter included in Picture Perfect, cited below. By the 1950s and Disney’s feature-length Sleeping Beauty, it seemed as though this excessive reliance on ballet was to Disney’s detriment; as if ballet’s perceived limitations were rubbing off on animation at the studio. In fact so closely does Esther Leslie’s characterisation of the aesthetic dominating Disney in the 1950s - as being ‘excessively detailed’, marked by ‘pernickety realism’, exuding ‘magical radiance’- echo charges commonly levelled at ballet in general, and at The Sleeping Beauty in particular, that it is worth pursuing these parallels a bit further here. For Richard Schickel, writing on Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty Disney animations, at a distance of some twenty-seven years from the latter’s 1959 premiere, ‘detail was piled on detail, technical effect on technical effect, until the story was virtually buried under their weight. It was an art of limited – some would say non-existent – sensibility, a style that laboured to recreate the trifles of real movement, that fussed over decorative elements, that refused to consider the possibilities in the dictum that less is more. The wonderful simplicity that Disney’s graphic art naturally possessed in the beginning and that he might have distrusted as betraying its humble origins, disappeared. In the late films complexity of draughtsmanship was used to demonstrate virtuosity and often became an end in itself, a way of demonstrating what was a kind of growth in technical resourcefulness but not, unfortunately, in artfulness.’ (Schickel quoted in Leslie, 290). Schickel’s critique of Disney is equally applicable to ballet, which is frequently accused of privileging technical stunts and empty virtuosity over thematic substance; of evacuating content from style.This evaluation is shared by animation historian Charles Solomon, who similarly deems the dependence of Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty on dance as being at animation’s expense: ‘Both human characters [Princess Aurora and Prince Philip] seem too close to the live-action reference to be very interesting in animation. Although rendered with consummate skill, their waltz in the forest seemed dull’ (Charles Solomon quoted in Davis, 2014: 165). Sleeping Beauty’s animators, to quote Leslie, ‘were requested to study a full-length live-action version, and Disney told his artists to make the characters “as real as possible, near-flesh-and-blood”’ (Leslie: 295). This means that ontologically speaking, the roots of Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty must in part lie firmly in live dance performance. The action was danced first, this dance was captured as live-action reference footage, from which thousands of drawings were in turn made, coloured, finished and - only then, finally - animated. Indeed, of all the Disney feature length animations, the connection to ballet is perhaps strongest in the case of the studio’s Sleeping Beauty: as Charles Solomon observes, ‘Sleeping Beauty is of course one of the great storybook ballets and animation, like ballet, is a form of choreographed motion. Everything is planned, its rhythms are worked out, and discussed just as fine dance is.’. ‘The animators would [even] listen to the Tchaikovsky score’ adds fellow Disney historian Russell Schroeder (Schroeder in Picture Perfect…). The labour involved in this transposition of dance performance into animation was also highly gendered, and in terms not unfamiliar from ballet: the workforce of inkers and painters was female, while the animators were male. ‘Working conditions [at the Burbank studio] were factory-like’ writes Leslie, ‘a six-day working week was standard’ with ‘poor pay and working practices that organised Disney’s exploitation of the work force in terms that were highly gendered’ having triggered a general strike at Disney in 1941. ‘They make less than house painters. The girls are the lowest paid in the entire cartoon industry’ urged a strike flyer advocating a boycott of theatres showing Disney pictures (Leslie 207; 208; 210). And much like the original 1890 Mariinsky Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty which, as the high water-mark of ballet à grand spectacle was hugely expensive and never again attempted on such a scale in Russia, the costs involved in the lavish spectacle of the 1959 animation ensured that ‘Sleeping Beauty was truly the end of an era of that kind of Disney film making’ (Picture Perfect…). Disney’s indebtedness to dance extends into the twenty-first century, through Maleficent. This must necessarily follow from the film’s dialogue with the Disney legacy. For, in taking on this legacy, given its reliance on ballet, Maleficent has, in some quite significant sense, to be entering into dialogue with ballet as well. The film’s Moors thrive as a fairy protectorate in female gendered terms redolent both of Charles Perrault’s La belle au bois dormant and the Imperial Russian ballet The Sleeping Beauty, premiered in St. Petersburg in 1890 and a work which also has its literary basis in Perrault. Significantly, the film’s closing credits are careful to acknowledge Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation and Perrault’s seventeenth-century literary account of the fairy tale as its twin sources. In fact, the Disney Sleeping Beauty animation is so closely led by the redaction of Perrault presented by the ballet’s libretto, as to suggest that the studio’s access to Perrault’s account was, in effect, routed via, and mediated by, the ballet. The Disney studio’s acknowledgment of Perrault, then, actually serves to strengthen the bond between its 1959 film and the late nineteenth-century balletic treatment of the fairy tale and so – it must follow – ultimately between the same ballet and Maleficent. Dance scholar Sally Banes stresses the distinctions between the ballet and Perrault: To look at the ballet The Sleeping Beauty is a different matter entirely than reading Perrault’s tale, for a number of reasons. First, the female characters created by the ballet turn out to be far more complex than those on the page…[second,] the authors of the ballet chose not to include the second part of the Perrault tale, in which Beauty and her children are threatened by her mother-in-law (Banes: 48).Apparently taking its cue from the ballet, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty animation similarly dispenses with the second half of Perrault’s original plot. Meanwhile, in its very focus on the tale’s malevolent fairy, a figure who, as Banes also points out, is neither named or described by Perrault, Maleficent honours the ballet’s commitment to the role of Carabosse which, together with that of her alter ego, the Lilac Fairy, it (the ballet) had ‘significantly enlarged’ (Banes: 47; 49). The heavy dependence of the 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation on certain sections of Tchaikovsky’s ballet music for Sleeping Beauty, and not others, is another indicator of Disney’s reliance on ballet’s mediation of Perrault, for its rendition of the fairy tale. As Walt Disney himself said to camera in The Peter Tchaikovsky Story, made for television by the Disney Studios to be broadcast in 1959, in the run-up to the release of the animation, ‘our inspiration for Sleeping Beauty was the wonderful score written more than seventy-five years ago by Peter Tchaikovsky for his ballet version of The Sleeping Beauty’. It is unlikely that ballet productions of The Sleeping Beauty staged in its prologue-and-three-acts balletic entirety would have been overly familiar to West Coast, American audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. That is, with the notable exception of the full length version of this ballet toured by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet: In 1950, for instance, the company included The Sleeping Beauty on its North American tour, performing at the Los Angeles ‘Shrine auditorium, with an audience full of film stars. The Shrine holds nearly seven thousand people; the Company played to full houses for two weeks.’ (Anderson: 111). The ‘story[line]’ for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was, apparently, ‘pretty well set from 1952’ (Picture Perfect…). It is likely, however, that Disney personnel would have had much more ready access to Aurora’s Wedding, a one-act redaction of the ballet. Also performed under its French title (Le Mariage d’Aurore), this ballet, devised by Serge Diaghilev in 1922 as a less wieldy, truncated, and so more economically viable, version of the full length Sleeping Beauty, was regularly performed by his Ballets Russes company. In the decades following Diaghilev’s death in 1929, Aurora’s Wedding became a staple of Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. An audit of the log of productions, annual performance numbers, and tour details compiled in the notebook of that company’s rehearsal director, Serge Leonidovich Grigoriev, now housed in the Harvard Theatre Collection, indicates that Aurora’s Wedding was the third most performed ballet in an extensive repertoire, being danced 864 times between 1932 and 1954, and was a work regularly programmed on the West Coast leg of annual US tours. The log shows that de Basil’s company danced Aurora’s Wedding in Los Angeles in the years 1935-1938 inclusive, and then again in 1940 and 1947, for instance. Disney’s familiarity with Aurora’s Wedding is suggested, too, by the particular reliance of the studio’s 1959 animation, the best part of a decade in the making, on those musical numbers from Tchaikovsky’s full Sleeping Beauty score included as part of the orchestral arrangement for this one-act redaction. In George Bruns’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s score for Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent is not overly identified - as might be expected - with Carabosse’s musical theme from the ballet, which is a feature of the overture to the full-length ballet, and is heard again in its prologue; first; and second acts. This omission seems less surprising, however, given that Carabosse’s theme is not included in the reduced score for Aurora’s Wedding. Instead, music for the third-act Puss in Boots and White Cat divertissement, which is frequently retained in this one-act version of the ballet, serves as Maleficent’s musical accompaniment at critical, culminating points in the 1959 animation so that it, in effect, becomes her musical motif. Carabosse’s own theme is occasionally drawn upon and associated with Maleficent in the Disney animation but to a lesser extent.Maleficent’s indebtedness to the Tchaikovsky-Petipa Sleeping Beauty, like that of the 1959 animation, is multi-faceted, so continuing the ongoing connection between this ballet and Disney. Particularly noteworthy is the legacy of the ballet’s already commented upon female-centrism - of its ‘“feminine microcosm”’ to borrow Arlene Croce’s term (quoted in Banes: 49) - transmitted along a matriarchal line of descent from the ballet (1890) to Disney animation (1959) to live-action film (2014). The importance of Maleficent’s female-centric world for that film’s capacity to critique neoliberalist excess, invites further scrutiny of the striking congruence of this dance-indebted, gendered identity with the potential for political analysis. This congruence is particularly felt in Maleficent’s key thematics; it is borne out in the film’s rewriting of Disney’s stepmother-as-abuser trope, especially. For the sourcing of Maleficent’s predicament, in the 2014 film, to an originating act of violent socio-economic disenfranchisement is also highly familiar from Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890); in particular from the ballet’s characterization of its malevolent fairy, Carabosse. As Croce describes her, in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s 1946 production, Carabosse is a ‘heavily aged, insulted old queen’ (Croce: 371). And the ballet’s audience gauges that Carabosse’s bout of extreme vengefulness when, in an act of crass social exclusion, she is left off the invitation list for Princess Aurora’s christening, results - like her malevolent predicament in general - from an originating act that makes this latest social slight psychically impossible for her to bear. That act, unspecified in the ballet, is elaborated upon in the film: In an early scene, Maleficent, ‘the strongest fairy of them all…the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a [moorland] kingdom which needed neither king nor queen and [where everyone] trusted one another’ (Maleficent narration), is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act betokens rape for Jolie. In an interview with BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour (BBC, 2014b), Jolie spoke of how she read the loss of Maleficent’s wings in the film as the figuration of rape which she had confronted in her special envoy work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The legacies of sexual violence which she had encountered in Bosnia had prompted Jolie to direct her first feature film, In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), about the Bosnia conflict of the 1990s; to work to establish the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI); and to co-host the four-day Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, held in London in June 2014. Jolie has since been appointed Visiting Professor in Practice at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security of the London School of Economics. Moving the focus of the Woman’s Hour interview, which was conducted at the four-day summit, to Maleficent, the film having had its London premiere the month before, Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray observed: ‘There’s a very interesting scene in your latest film, Maleficent, the backstory of Sleeping Beauty’s wicked witch where she is effectively raped – her wings are torn away. What, having gone through all the experiences that you’ve had in recent years did you hope the message of that film would be?’Jolie responded in the following terms: ‘It was beautifully written by Linda Woolverton and we did, there was the question - and of course it’s a Disney movie – and so the point is she comes to this christening and curses the child and why would she do this? But in essence the question was asked what could make a woman become so dark…[that] something would have to be so violent, so aggressive and so of course for us we were very conscious –the writer and I – that it was a metaphor for rape and that this would be the thing that would make her lose sight of that and then at a certain point, the question of this story is, what could possibly bring her back? Umm, and it is an extreme, Disney version of that but at the core it is, it is abuse and how the abused then have a choice of either abusing others or overcoming and, er, remaining loving, open people.’ (BBC, 2014b) Some feminist blogs responded to Maleficent’s figuration of sexual violence by raising important questions to do with the aestheticisation of rape which they perceive in the film. Feminist Fiction, for instance, deemed Maleficent ‘certainly worthy of discussion…with lots of fantastic ideas…and fundamental themes [that] are still solid’, but lamented encountering ‘metaphorical rape as a plot device yet again.’(Thomas, 2014). Even putting aside the aestheticisation of sexual violence through its cinematic representation as, however important, ultimately beyond this article’s central focus, here the film’s indexing of Jolie’s autobiographical experience is significant. This indexation extended to the film’s reception by film critics, with some (i.e. Gilbey; Macnab) connecting - overly reductively, in the eyes of others - Maleficent’s loss of wings to the preventative double mastectomy Jolie had recently undergone prior to the film, ‘after learning she had an 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer’ (Hiscock: 3). The film audience’s identification with Jolie in the archetypal Jungian sense, which this sort of autobiographical referencing both enables and results from, is understood by this paper as a key vector in how Maleficent works its affective power, something to be returned to later. This is certainly how the film was received at the time of its release, The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey noting: ‘The crossover between actor and character gives the audience the impression that we are sneaking a peak into the performer’s psyche, while the autobiographical element deepens the fiction in turn.’ (Gilbey: 13). ‘Maleficent' and Neoliberalism: Sexual violence, war, and land grabIn ‘After neoliberalism: The need for a gender revolution’, Beatrix Campbell calls on the term ‘new wars’ which Mary Kaldor uses, in order to define those‘new modes of armed conflict that are proliferating across the flexible frontiers of globalised capitalism, between and within states. Violence is franchised out to auxiliary militias, security corporations and freelancing warlords…their networks of criminal free trade and spatial domination overpower the best efforts of “new democracies” from Soweto to Sao Paulo. As Kaldor insists, rape and pillage are the modus operandi of “new wars”: they should not be seen as collateral damage. Neoliberal capitalism radiates violence…violence is not unthinking visceral primitive; [rather] it is produced by and productive of, power and control over land.’ (Campbell: 12). For Campbell, then, ‘the violence that neoliberal capitalisation generates is an integral part of its evolving gender settlement’, something that she terms as its ‘neopatriarchy’ (Campbell: 12). It is precisely this same land grab-motivated sexual violence that is experienced by Maleficent. The bonds of romantic interspecies love that unfolded between the young Maleficent and the human Stefan, who is one such ‘freelancing warlord’, to use Campbell’s term, are violently betrayed when he delivers her severed wings to the dying king of his human kingdom, securing that kingdom for himself in exchange for this fairy bounty. Consequently, Maleficent can be read as a film that maps the relationship of humans to land as one of ethnobiological precarity; of human interspecies violence. ‘I had wings once. They were stolen from me. That’s all I wish to say about it. I had wings once. They were big and strong: they never faltered’ Maleficent explains to Aurora later in the film. The effect of Stefan’s violence in the service of patriarchal authority is to constrain Maleficent’s motility, confining her to a more conventionally feminine, and literally more pedestrian, female motility. In this way, Maleficent’s containment is a variant of the classic feminist phenomenological reading of the socialization of the female body as itself amounting to another kind of enclosure. Iris Marion Young, according to Bonnie Mann, ‘tells us that as the body-subject moves, she gathers the world around her into lived relations of space (2005a: 39) and particular modalities of feminine spatiality emerge’. Quoting Young, Mann writes of howenclosure is one modality of feminine spatiality, since the space of the “I can” for women tends to be gathered tightly and held close, and is represented by girls as enclosed by high walls. Feminine space is thus severed into a dual structure, in which a tightly drawn “here” is cut off from a “yonder” into which the body-subject can see, but into which she cannot move.’ (Mann: 83, italics are hers). The subsequent loss of Maleficent’s wings renders her previously aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; every day and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies in the ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, must substitute more mundane mime in their place. If, as Elizabeth Bell points out, the ‘performance affection’ of ‘Disney’s evil women, the beautiful witches, queens and stepmothers’ is cast (interestingly in terms not unlike those allocated to ballet’s Carabosse) in ‘metaphors [that] are not borrowed from the bodies of classical dancers’, Maleficent productively complicates this simple equation, in revealing the original, pre-trauma motility of its titular character as aerial, and so hyper-virtuosic. Maleficent’s unfolding negotiation of the constraints of enclosure is highly significant for the film’s potential as critique of neoliberalism since, for David Harvey, enclosure is so intrinsic to the pursuit of neoliberalist policies.There is a tendency to think of David Harvey’s work on neoliberalism principally in terms of his landmark studies of neoliberalism and the urbanization of capital (1999; 2007b). Yet Harvey has also directed attention to the relationship between land and capitalism. In thinking about the place that land has come to occupy for the neoliberal corporatised state, Harvey specifically understands this relationship as one of land grab. Land grab might be described as a sort of late capitalist riff on the enclosure movement. Indeed, Harvey understands globalization as entailing a new round of ‘“enclosure of the commons” (everything from the privatisation of social housing in Britain, of the ejido system of peasant landholding in Mexico, of community services such as water provision in Argentina and South Africa) [that] has opened up new terrains for surplus [capital] absorption.’ (Harvey, 2007a: 64-65). Heralding early capitalism’s embrace of an emergent agrarian economy, enclosure, in its eighteenth-century variant, entailed the erosion of common land rights to roam; graze livestock; and subsist, and their replacement by a more intensively worked, capitalized and - critically - enclosed rural economy. According to E.P. Thompson, enclosure in eighteenth-century Britain amounted to ‘a plain enough case of class robbery’ (Thompson quoted in Kain et al: 2). ‘Of course’, Robert Marzec points out, ‘this long history of the land’s privatization [ ] amounts to no more than a preamble to the kind of massive, planetary-wide enclosures we are seeing today.’ (Marzec: 84). Maleficent, we are told by the film’s narration, often liked ‘to wander alone’, and her ambulatory, pedestrian motility might be taken as an embodied insistence on the pre-enclosure ethics of the right to roam. And Maleficent’s female identity is not insignificant here, allowing the film to join in ‘challenging and over-writing the powerful (art-) historical figure of the solo male walker’ identified by Stephen Daniels et al (Daniels: 1) as an enduring masculinist trope of western inscriptions of territory. Maleficent’s enfranchising pedestrianism amounts, then, to a feminine, counter-hegemonic critique of capitalist, and now neoliberal, economics of land. Citing Harvey’s The New Imperialism, Nigel Thrift has also commented, in terms strikingly similar to Harvey’s, on the ‘increasing exploitation of large parts of the world through what Marx calls primitive accumulation’: ‘It is clear’ writes Thrift, ‘that a considerable area of the globe is being ravaged by force, dispossession and enclosure as part of a search for mass commodities like oil, gas, gems and timber, using all of the usual suspects: guns, barbed wire and the law.’ (Thrift: 30). Thrift’s position is part of a consensus on neoliberal land economy: Writing in a similar vein, Thomas Nail especially identifies the resurgence of enclosure with the last decade; as a phenomenon of the financial crisis: ‘Foreign investors and governments have acquired 540 million acres since 2006, resulting in the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries’ (Nail: 1). Stuart Hall et al view ‘the buying up of vast tracts of land’ as intrinsic to the ‘particular global character of neoliberalism….[as part of neoliberalism’s] planetary search for new assets in which to speculate’ (Hall, Massey, and Rustin: 10). And Roger Kain et al remind us of how, in terms of its ‘historical, legal meaning’, ‘enclosure involved the removal of communal rights, controls or ownership over a piece of land and its conversion into “severalty”, that is a state where the owner had sole control over its use, and access to it.’ (Kain et al: 1). Indeed, as the ‘protector of the Moors’, Maleficent fiercely defends this territory from the designs of the neighbouring marauder state, so preserving its pre-enclosure open spaces from the dictates of purely economic yield. Maleficent, her supernatural powers of protection diminished but not extinguished by the loss of her wings, resists the ‘ontological anxiety’ intrinsic to enclosure and according to which land – and nature in general – came to be reimagined in the socio-political consciousness as an enemy in need of domestication, and the people working the land, especially those rioting against enclosures and the inequalities they produced, as recalcitrant vagabonds in need of discipline and incarceration. (Marzec: 84).Consequently Maleficent, as she is realised in the feature film bearing her name, is able to resist and reverse Maleficent’s identity in the Disney Sleeping Beauty animation. In that 1959 film, she was, to quote Kathleen Coyne Kelly, synonymous with ‘the antithesis of benign nature’ (Kelly: 197). As enclosure involved ‘a land broken down and arranged so that it became more obedient and useful’, a land literally subject to ‘husbandry’ (Marzec: 87), Maleficent is also able to undo the identification of landscape in rigidly gendered terms, according to which the tamed, enclosed landscape was always read as feminised. Speaking in 2011 at a New York event on land grab in India – though he stresses that the practice is as endemic in Africa and China, as land in those regions is also increasingly capitalized - Harvey stressed how in most economic theories, land is treated as a side issue, with the result that land is not considered as fundamentally as it should be. This is despite the fact that, according to Harvey, the bourgeoisie has made more money out of land speculation than factory production, and that since the start of the post-2008 financial crisis, surplus capital drives land grab as capital has run out of options in trying to find a secure source of profitability, heralding a shift from property markets to land. Land grab in China, Africa, and India has rendered land subservient to corporate interests. And yet despite land grab becoming much more prominent, Harvey points to the absence of a theoretical model to understand the economics of land grab, and the resulting economy of dispossession which land grab in turn triggers (Harvey 2011). Maleficent’s staging of land grab as a key driver of the contemporary neoliberal project could be read precisely in light of the ‘growing awareness of environmental problems [which] seems likely to create serious new difficulties of legitimation for neoliberal regimes’ (Connell: 35). ‘You will not have the Moors, not now, not ever!’ Maleficent declares to the bellicose king as she defends ‘the Moors and its treasures’ from the marauder designs of his neighbouring kingdom; ‘the greedy, envious humans who want to invade her moorland kingdom’ (Macnab: 37). Maleficent, then, arguably contributes to an ‘emergent critical aesthetics’, to borrow a term from Lauren Berlant who – significantly - especially nominates film as a driver of the new aesthetics. This is meant in the sense that Maleficent calls attention to institutions and categories that had previously fallen outside the critique of neoliberalism: namely the incorporation of previously unenclosed land mass as latterly part of the neoliberal project.Labour and gender in ‘Maleficent’ i) male labour with particular reference to Marx on the working dayOne particular scene in Maleficent could be construed as staging, in textbook Marxist terms, the struggle between the capitalist exploiter-sovereign King Stefan and the foreman of his exploited proletariat iron workers, over the length of the working day. Discussing how Karl Marx inferred certain general laws of motion of capital from his theory of surplus value, David Harvey, in his commentary on Marx’s method in Capital, cites as a paradigmatic example, Marx’s demonstration ‘that capital-accumulation depended upon extracting more value from the labourers than they needed to reproduce themselves. This meant that capitalists had to control the time of the labourer and from this derived the competitive necessity to extend the working day for as long as possible and within that day to push the intensity of labouring to its limits. When Marx asks the question: do we see struggles over the length of the working day going on around us all of the time, do we see perpetual attempts to control the time of others and to increase intensity in the labour- process, then the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ (and he had all the factory-inspectors’ reports to prove it). Struggles over working time are largely ignored in conventional economics, whereas Marx insists that they are foundational.’ (Harvey, 2012: 7-8) Awakening from a nightmare about Maleficent with cries of ‘she’s coming, she’s coming!’, King Stefan goes straight to the foreman of the iron foundry. Forcibly rousting the foreman from his slumber in the middle of night, the king orders him to start up the forges and immediately put the iron smelters to work: Iron is capable of burning fairies, the infant Maleficent had explained to the child Stefan at the film’s start when, in their first, tentative handshake, she had recoiled from the inadvertent touch of his metal ring. Given its fairy-extinguishing properties, iron therefore forms the mainstay of the arsenal of King Stefan’s army in the war it wages against Maleficent and her Moors kingdom; a weapon in the king’s increasingly desperate campaign to defeat and destroy Maleficent. The ensuing struggle between the capitalist king and ironworkers’ foreman is worth reproducing and commenting further upon here:Stefan: ‘Where are your workers?’Foreman: ‘In their beds your majesty.’Stefan: ‘Get them back to work without delay!’Foreman: ‘They’re exhausted sire but I’ll have them back to work at first light.’Stefan (violently assaulting the Foreman): ‘But I need them back to work NOW!’Foreman: ‘It’s the wee hours.’Stefan: ‘Aye, it’s the wee hours. So wake them and get them back to work now. We’re running out of time!’ This scene is suggestive of Marxist economic theory; particularly in its representation of the workers’ production of surplus capital. To bear this out, it is helpful here to turn to David Harvey’s commentary once more, this time on the commons. As Harvey has pointed out, ‘the spiralling degradation of common land and [of] common labor resources…at the hands of capital’ are two sides of the same coin (Harvey 2011: 107). This is because, for Harvey, the abuse of the factory labourer and of land are two aspects of the same phenomenon: the loss of commons. In fact, according to Harvey, ‘socially necessary labor time, is the capitalist common…the common is not therefore something extant once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that, like the urban commons, is continuously being produced. The problem is that it is just as continuously being enclosed and appropriated by capital in its commodified and monetary form.’ (Harvey 2011: 105) Labour, in Harvey’s account, is thus territory’s corollary as ‘individualized capital accumulation perpetually threatens to destroy the two basic common property resources that undergird all forms of production: the labourer and the land’ (Harvey: 106). Gaining credence and adherents in some unexpected quarters, this Marxist account of the operations and effect of the neoliberal labour economy is fast coming to assume the position of something approaching a classic economic reading. The film’s identification of the enclosure of the commons as a masculinist endeavour is in keeping with its construction of political and territorial economies along gendered lines, according to which Maleficent is entrusted with the protectorate of the pre-enclosure Moors commons, so that this is conceived of as a female project. The fastening of bellicose associations to the film’s representation of captialized labour further contributes to its gendered identity and association with neoliberal land grab: With the race to produce and bear arms staged by the film in these terms, war, as it is conceived of in Maleficent, is consequently redolent not only of the kinds of wars currently waged in the interests of neoliberal land grab, as this article has already identified. It is reminiscent too, as the ‘working hours’ scene eloquently demonstrates, of those earlier European conflicts which, pitting state against state, were key agents in the early modern state’s transition from a feudal to capital-based economy. ‘The nation-state’, to quote Harry Harootunian, is the ‘the trajectory of capitalism[’s]… enthusiastic political partner’, one ‘that enables [its – capitalism’s] expansion’ (Harootunian: 481). And Brecht - to cite a key dramaturgical and, for the purposes of this article’s preoccupation with performance as neoliberal critique, highly cognate, example - understood seventeenth-century Europe, ravaged by The Thirty Years War, in precisely these terms, in his play Mother Courage and her Children (1939): War denoted capitalism for Brecht, or, as he put it, ‘the continuation of business by other means’ (Brecht quoted in Thomson: 10). The characterization, in Maleficent, of the relationship between sovereign and foreman also chimes with Maurizio Lazzarato’s nomination of ‘the main difference’ between Keynesian liberal and neoliberal economics. This ‘is that, for neoliberalism, it is the freedom of the enterprise and the entrepreneur which needs to be produced and organized, whilst the freedom of the worker and that of the consumer who were at the centre of Keynesian liberalism are made subordinate.’ (Lazzarato: 120). In this way Maleficent is able to point simultaneously to the centrality of war for contemporary neoliberal political economy, as well as to the equally central implication of European warfare in the emergence of the capitalist economic settlement which had furnished the preconditions necessary for neoliberalism in the first place. Again to quote Lazzarato, who in turn draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, ‘capital acts as a powerful “point of subjectivation constituting everyone as subjects, but some, the capitalists, are enunciators, whilst the others, the proletariat, are enunciated, subjected to technical machines”.’ (Lazzarato: 126). King Stefan is one such capitalist enunciator, just as the foreman of his ironworks is a member of the enunciated proletariat. According to Patrick D. Murphy, Disney animation has typically been consistent ‘in reflecting the cultural drive toward nature through promoting a capitalist work ethic among dwarfs, princes, mice, servants, and heavily anthropomorphized animals’ (Murphy: 58). In its identification of King Stefan’s human kingdom with the capitalist exploitation of natural and human resources, Maleficent, it might be said, goes some way towards offering - to borrow Diana Coole’s term - ‘a critical political economy or phenomenology of a world where global capitalism condemns millions to virtual slavery and poverty’ (Coole, 2001). Constructing the human kingdom in this way, Maleficent draws on steampunk conventions. Steampunk narratives frequently reverse science and fantasy fiction’s investment in imaginary, futurist utopias. In their place, steampunk conjures apocalyptic cities and kingdoms which, despite their often historicised settings, project visions of neoliberalism’s endgame as one of anarchic deregulation and extreme alienation. Here it is also highly significant that the parallels established in Maleficent between capitalist and - to borrow a key term from the vocabularies used to critique neoliberalism - precariant, seem to be drawn in terms designed deliberately to resonate with the film audience’s lived experience of neoliberalism. Intrinsic to this process of audience identification is the way in which, from the outset, the film is careful to characterize the distinctions between Stefan’s human kingdom and Maleficent’s realm of The Moors in the sharpest terms. Again, to quote Maleficent’s opening lines of narration: ‘In one kingdom lived folk like you and me [present writer’s emphasis] with a vain and greedy king to rule over them: They were forever discontent and envious of the wealth and beauty of their neighbours. For, in the other kingdom, the Moors, lived every manner of strange and wonderful creatures and they needed neither king nor queen but trusted in one another.’The narration expressly identifies the film’s viewers with ‘folk like you and me’ who, as the subjects of Stefan’s human kingdom, are left to look on enviously at the neighbouring Moors, a territory replete with abundant natural beauty and resources, and populated by many and various richly divergent communities who live together in interspecies harmony. Free from the despotic and tyrannical sovereign rule to which the inhabitants of Stefan’s kingdom are subject, the citizens of the Moors enjoy instead the benevolent protection of the fairies. Significantly, gender plays an important role in establishing the two kingdoms as highly divergent kinds of territorial and social organisation. ‘Vain and greedy’ Stefan depends, for the imposition of his war thirsty and repressive regime, on a male phalanx of bellicose generals and lieutenants. Labour and gender in ‘Maleficent’ ii) female agency, surrogacy, and women’s unacknowledged labourThe wounds and scars with which violence marks Maleficent, as it had Carabosse in the ballet, are sutured, in the film, by the surrogate mothering of the motherless young princess Aurora that Maleficent eventually takes on. Maleficent’s neomatriarchy, escaping the biological essentialism of reproductive motherhood in favour of surrogacy defined in terms that open surrogacy to men as well as to women, chimes with feminist readings of unacknowledged female domestic labour. Stella Sandford, for instance, drawing on Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, and Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, reminds us that ‘“child bearing” is a relatively minor part of what she [Ruddick] called “mothering” or “maternal work”, and many mothers will not have done it at all. In Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters pregnancy and birth are similarly not essential to mothering. (The inevitable corollary of this - welcomed by both Ruddick and Baraitser – is that it is not exclusively women who can be mothers.)…From a different perspective it is also implicit in Ruddick’s claim that the distinction between “birthing labor” and “mothering” means that “all mothers are ‘adoptive’. To adopt is to commit oneself to protecting, nurturing, and training particular children. Even the most passionately loving birthgiver engages in a social adoptive act when she commits herself to sustain an infant in the world.” Of course, not all birthgivers will do this.’ (Sandford: endnotes xix and xx, p.11). When the film is read in light of Sandford’s comments, a sort of playful, resistor-neomatriarchy characterises Maleficent in the film, one that might be construed as a Feminist response to Campbell’s reading of neoliberalism as neopatriarchy. This is even if this sort of latitude granted to the film where its loosening of the conventional associations of women with maternity is concerned, only seems permissible in Hollywood terms given the real-life identification of Jolie with motherhood: she is both an adoptive and biological mother. As Ryan Gilbey wrote at the time of the film’s release, ‘casting Angelina Jolie as a woman who overcomes her natural antipathy to children is a joke we can all smile at: she and Pitt have six’ (Gilbey: 13). And the casting of Jolie’s daughter, the five year-old Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, as the infant Aurora who is rejected in the film by Maleficent, arguably works in the same vein, to extend this latitude further.In this way, Maleficent, like the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, operates as a world of female-centred endeavour. In 1890 The Sleeping Beauty, and the many subsequent versions spawned by this Tchaikovsky-Petipa production, male roles are those of weak, bit players in the ballet’s drama. It requires the ballet’s benevolent, Lilac Fairy (lilac denoting wisdom in Russia, progenitor of present-day productions of the ballet), who is also the alter ego of the ballet’s evil Carabosse, ancestral fairy to Maleficent, to tell the prince what to do: ‘Think…kiss her!’ the Lilac Fairy mimes to the prince. In Maleficent the young Prince Philip similarly procrastinates in his wooing of Aurora and the film actually extends this princely ineffectiveness a stage further: In its failure to wake the sleeping princess, his kiss yields nothing, thereby suspending - at least for a while - the narrative closure of the romantic happy ending. Maleficent has to intervene: it is only her - by this stage benevolent and godmotherly - kiss that eventually revives Aurora from her deep slumber. Consequently, for Elle Fanning, cast as Aurora in the film, Maleficent is ‘more about sister love than romantic love’ (Maleficent press conference). The film’s remaining male characters - the old, ailing King Henry and his successor the young King Stefan - are morally compromised and weakened by their vanity or greed. And as kings, their fallibility additionally carries with it an implicit critique of patriarchal structures and lineage. The reading offered here, in suggesting that Disney is not entirely the vehicle for the perpetuation of patriarchal values and interests, chimes with interpretations of how male authority is represented in the Disney canon more generally: For Elizabeth Bell, ‘typical Disney king[s]…exert no control over their children, their lackeys, their castles or their kingdoms [So that] through animation, Disney artists have constructed a powerful critique of patriarchal discourse: the inefficacy of the divine right of kings is both drawn and storied…’ (Bell: 55). Maleficent’s retention of the female centric world of The Sleeping Beauty ballet would seem to help furnish the pre-conditions for the film’s gendered critique of neoliberal policies, policies which, for geographer Phil Hubbard, ‘are also about asserting the primacy of virile masculinity’ (Hubbard quoted in Connell: 33). Here it is relevant to note too how, at press conferences, as in her BBC Radio 4 interview already cited above, Jolie stressed that Linda Woolverton’s screenplay for Maleficent had been a significant factor in her decision to take on the film’s titular role (Maleficent press conference). As the author of Beauty and the Beast (1991), with its characterisation of Belle as ‘an active, intelligent young wom[a]n’, Woolverton had been the first female writer to author a ‘Disney tale/film screenplay’ (Bell: 53). Woolverton’s screenplay for Maleficent similarly refuses the re-enactment of what Kimberly Lau, in her discussion of how Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love ‘interrupts the confining legacy of this Sleeping Beauty tradition’, terms ‘the script of her [Sleeping Beauty’s] patriarchal narrative inheritance.’ (Lau: 123; 133). This again chimes with, and extends, the account of Perrault offered by the ballet: For feminist dance scholar and historian Sally Banes, the ballet ‘engenders a mixed message, riddled with paradoxes, about women. As a court-bound and generated narrative one might presume that it would be relentlessly patriarchal. But ironically Beauty’s world is one in which men nearly disappear and women reign supreme, apparently contradicting the gendered messages of the literary versions of fairy tales that inspired the ballet.’ (Banes: 65). And here Banes pushes this reading further, in order to argue that‘for complex reasons, in the ballet version of The Sleeping Beauty various historical factors conspired to undermine the legacy of institutional sexism, and to create instead challenging, positive images of female power and autonomy on stage...[so that] one gets a picture of a completely matriarchal world… which …exists in the utopian, woman-centred world of many fairytales.’ (Banes: 65).If Carabosse is already part of a matriarchal world in the balletic version of The Sleeping Beauty, this is further accentuated in the film by the killing off, early on in its narrative arc, of Aurora’s mother, thereby clearing the path for Maleficent’s eventual adoption of a maternal, godmotherly role as her relationship with Aurora evolves from one of malevolent hostility to that of benevolent care. As has already been seen, coverage of the film’s popular success was quick to pick up on its gendered identity. And here it is not insignificant that both film and ballet source their account in the version of Sleeping Beauty as recounted by Perrault. According to Kimberly Lau’s account of how Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber offers a critique of those hegemonic notions of gender and patriarchal power enshrined in canonical versions of The Sleeping Beauty, it is in the Grimms’ version ‘when she is called Briar Rose’, that the princess is ‘at her most passive’: ‘Little Brier Rose’s womanly silence is particularly striking and especially socially significant when compared with Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, whose awakening is preordained and not dependent on the hero’s kiss and whose slumber is solitary as opposed to social. In Perrault’s 1697 “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, Sleeping Beauty says to the approaching hero, “Is it you, my prince?...You have kept me waiting a long time!” (A. Carter 1977, 64). Up to this point, the two versions are fairly closely aligned, but the princess’s awakening signals their dramatic departure. In Perrault’s version, Sleeping Beauty engages the hero in conversation: “He was more tongue-tied than she, because she had had plenty of time to dream of what she would say to him’.” (Lau, 66).Part two - Maleficent as choreo-philosophical critique of neoliberlism: Cynicism, Carabosse, dance and cinemaCarabosse and Maleficent as Diogenes: pedestrianism and the Cynic lifeMuch is made, in the film, of Maleficent’s pedestrianism; her predilection for walking, as a figure who, the narration tells us early in the film, ‘often liked to wander alone’. This manner of her walking, as a solitary, often cloaked, figure, always aided, from the moment Maleficent is violently shorn of her wings, by a staff , is highly redolent of what Frédéric Gros, in his Philosophy of Walking, terms ‘the Cynic’s Approach’. ‘Forever on the move’, the Cynics, according to Gros, were ‘the only Greek sages who were authentic walkers’ (Gros, 2015: 130-131):‘It was from their demeanour and physical appearance that they were recognised [Gros writes]. In the one hand they carried a stout staff, on their shoulders a thick piece of fabric that served as blanket, overcoat and roof…They did their walking not so much to teach as to provoke and upset…They insulted and shocked people with their verbal attacks (Gros, 2015: 131).Gros’s editorship of Michel Foucault’s The Courage of the Truth makes him a reliable interlocutor for Cynic thinking since ‘a large part of the 1984 course is devoted to a highly original and one might even say abrasive presentation of ancient Cynicism.’ (Gros in Foucault: 350). Foucault took a particular interest in Cynicism in this, his last series of Collège de France lectures since the series was especially concerned with parrhēsia and ‘the Cynics were recognised by their parrhēsia (free-spokenness)’ (Gros in Foucault: 351). Foucault also views the Cynic life as possessing special scope for historical-critical thinking. This is particularly due to the Cynic investment in a notion of truth arrived at via breaking with all forms of existence in order to embrace the otherness of the alternative vie autre; the ‘other life’. Cynicism’s potential for historical critique, especially through its advocacy of the vie autre, makes it as effective a vehicle for the critique of neoliberal hegemonies. Maleficent’s staging of the Cynic life is therefore crucial, this discussion argues, for the nuanced, critical position which the film is able to adopt and articulate in relation to neoliberalism generally. The range of affinities between Cynicism and Maleficent indicates that a reading which considers the film in terms of its careful, painstaking even, articulation of Cynic philosophy is especially worth pursuing. This seems particularly the case given the stress that the Cynic life places on embodiment. Cynicism ‘has always been the poor relation in the history of ancient philosophy’, writes Gros, in a paraphrase of Foucault (Gros in Foucault: 350). Yet, at the same time, Foucault understands Cynicism as a branch of western philosophical thinking that depends more, for its articulation, on the embodied life of its adherents than on those other, written, modes which conventionally characterise philosophical discourse. With its intrinsic emphasis on the lived experience of the body, Cynicism is particularly well adapted for visualisation, and consequently for communication via embodied performance that is constructed, originally and substantially, through dance and then mediated via cinema. Although Maleficent already displays many Cynic-like traits even before her betrayal by Stefan, in a certain sense her Cynic existence is a societally useful response to Stefan’s greed driven ill-treatment of her. For Stefan does not reckon with Maleficent’s undiminished, defiant, and Cynic-like resolve defiantly to point up and resist the deficiencies of his human kingdom. He bargains even less for her eventual salvation, through the - equally Cynic-like - responsibility for Aurora’s wellbeing which Maleficent comes to assume. Speaking truth to power; unconcealment; brazenness; the embrace of the elemental; and breaking - in as many senses and as radically as possible - with the conventional life, are all paradigmatic traits of Cynic philosophy, as it was articulated in Hellenistic Greece and then ancient Rome. ‘But to what do you owe Diogenes’ staff and his parrhēsia?’ Emperor Julian asked critically of the fourth-century AD Cynic, Heracleios, comparing him unfavourably with Diogenes, the most influential exponent of Cynicism (Foucault: 170). For Foucault, ‘parrhēsia [that is, speaking all, hence speaking truth, ultimately to power] and staff are thus linked together; the Cynic uses parrhēsia and carries the staff.’ (Foucault: 170). These same Cynic traits are as equally representative of Maleficent, as she is characterised in the film, and of Carabosse, as she is rendered in the ballet Sleeping Beauty. In fact this paper will go on to suggest that through the genealogical line of Maleficent to Carabosse, the roots of these paired characters’ embodiment of a highly distinctive set of Cynic behaviours ultimately stretch much further back, to the ballet and beyond. Carabosse’s reliance, in the ballet, on pantomime, with its origins in Hellenistic pan-mimesis – literally showing or representing, everything – is actually the close cognate of Cynic parrhēsia since ‘etymologically parrhēsia is the activity that consists in saying everything: pan-rēma.’ (Foucault: 9). For now, though, it is helpful to concentrate on Carabosse, Maleficent and the Cynic life. Carabosse, Maleficent and the Cynic notion of the elementaryThe Cynic was ‘devoid of a dwelling place and possessions alike’, ‘lived out of doors’, ‘had no home…[and] slept in ditches…wrapped in his cloak’ (Gros, 2015: 132; 135). Maleficent likewise sleeps out of doors. Shown, once, in the nocturnal shelter of a ruined building, significantly, she is never represented domiciled. In the 1959 animation, Maleficent’s ‘castle’ was, similarly, ‘a heap of stones’ (Kelly: 197), and ballet’s Carabosse, devoid of a castle, is as itinerant. First encountered in Maleficent dwelling in the trees, and flying, winged and bird-like, over canyons, steams and pools, the figure of Maleficent is therefore associated from the outset with animality and the elemental, two defining qualities of the Cynic’s life. Referring to her pejoratively as ‘the wing-ed creature’ and ‘an elf’, the old King Henry underscores Maleficent’s association with animality. She is often glimpsed in a bower and later in the film, the infant Aurora is intrigued by Maleficent’s reptile-skin clad horns. Maleficent’s earliest acts are to heal a broken branch and to ‘deliver home’ to the water the bounty which the young Stefan, the ‘human thief [who had been found] at the pool of jewels’, had taken. ‘I’ll sleep in a tree and eat berries and black nuts [like you]’ the sixteen year-old Aurora eagerly anticipates when, once reconciled with Maleficent later in the film, she requests that she come to live with her, in her Moors kingdom. And, when Maleficent discovers that the adult Stefan has violently torn her wings from her during a drugged sleep, as a trophy to present to the ailing monarch of his human kingdom, she is shown waking up in the open-air, by a stream. ‘Now for Foucault [writes Gros] this wandering destitution is the manifest expression of a testing of experience by the truth This theme is crucial for it allows the sudden appearance of a dimension which has largely been unnoticed by classical Western philosophy: the elementary (l’élémentaire) (Gros in Foucault: 352): ‘The Cynics will put the question of the truth to life in its materiality, permitting that which resists absolutely to be brought to light: do I need feasts to feed myself, palaces to sleep? What really is necessary to live? Then, after ascetic reduction, the elementary rises to the surface, like a nappe of absolute necessity. There remains the earth for living, the starry sky as roof, and streams from which to drink.’ (Gros in Foucault: 352).Malificent as the articulation of Cynic parrhēsia ‘Go away, go, go away: I don’t like children’ Maleficent declares to the infant Aurora, ordering her to ‘Go along, go, go, go!’ By initially rejecting Aurora in this way - in effect renouncing any bonds that resemble motherly attachment - Maleficent adopts another classically Cynic position. For the Cynic, to quote Foucault, ‘is also the man [or indeed woman] who roams, who is not integrated into society, has no household, family, hearth or country’. In this way, the Cynic mode of life‘brings to light, in their irreducible nakedness, those things which alone are indispensable to human life or which constitute its most elementary, rudimentary essence. In this sense, this mode of life simply reveals what life is in its independence, its fundamental freedom, and consequently it reveals what life ought to be.’ (Foucault: 171). In Book III of the Discourses, by the ancient Greek, Stoic writer Epictetus, the Cynic says: “I have no wife, no children, no governor’s palace but only the earth and sky and an old cloak.’ (Epictetus, discourse xxii, quoted by Foucault: 171). In this Cynic context, reduction of life through, for instance, ‘absence of home’, does not equate with retreat from life. Quite the reverse, in fact, since it is ‘the home [that] i[s] understood as the place of secret, of isolation, and of protection from others’ (Foucault: 253). Similarly, lack of family implies neither abdication from responsibility for, nor absence of interconnection with, the lives of others. Rather, the opposite applies: the Cynic ‘must not marry…[since] he appears as a sort of universal night-watchman who keeps watch over the sleep of humanity. As a universal night-watchman, he must keep watch over all the others, over all those who are married, over all those who [do] have children.’ (Foucault: 301). As protector of the Moors, Maleficent is often seen keeping vigil at night. Carabosse is similarly identified with the nocturnal: for Giannandra Poesio, ‘Carabosse is Winter, the night.’ (Poesio, 1993: 39). And even at her most embittered, she recognises keeping watch over the newly-born Aurora as part of this responsibility. ‘It’s going to starve with those three looking after it’ Maleficent observes sarcastically of the well intentioned but comically inept child-rearing efforts of Fottle, Knotgrass and Thistlewit. This ‘trio of [female] fairies who sought to foster peace and goodwill’ (Maleficent narration) and were in attendance at Aurora’s christening, is subsequently entrusted by King Stefan with care of his daughter until her sixteenth birthday. The Cynic might be outside, writes Gros, but ‘it was from that elsewhere, that exteriority to the world of men, that he could equate low private acts and public vices. It was from that outside that he barracked, mocked and threw together the private and the public as a brace of petty human expedients.’ (Gros, 2015: 136)Similarly unencumbered, Maleficent is also able to extrapolate the political from the personal and vice versa, thereby practising one of Cynicism’s central tenets. That is, to adopt - and so honour - the parathesiastic position of ‘bringing back the question of truth to the question of its political conditions’ (Foucault: 68). ‘He did this to me so he would be king’ Maleficent declares, despite being sparing in her speech - a trait that is also in the Cynic tradition - on hearing the news of Stefan’s coronation as king of the human kingdom, on the death of the old king. Personal betrayal begets political power, she observes. The notion of parrhēsia, which Foucault understands as ‘free spokenness or truth telling’, is always, for Foucault, ‘first of all and fundamentally a political notion.’ (Foucault: 8). It involves ‘telling the truth without concealment, reserve, empty manner of speech, or rhetorical device which might encode or hide it’ (Foucault: 10). Consequently, ‘the act of truth…involves some form of courage’ (Foucault: 27). Maleficent as Cynic monarch and the Cynic conception of sovereignty In common with the Cynics, Maleficent has the courage to speak out, to speak truth to power: ‘You will not have the Moors, not now, not ever!’ is her battlefield cry to Henry, the old king of the human kingdom. In defeating the tyrannical king, Maleficent contributes to the critique of patriarchy which, as we have already seen, endures at the heart of neoliberalism. In this scene Maleficent undertakes the classic Cynic mission [which] takes the form of a battle. It has a polemical bellicose character….[s]he - the Cynic - is essentially, fundamentally, and constantly an aggressive benefactor whose main instrument is, of course, the famous diatribe…He attacks his enemies, that is to say, he attacks the vices afflicting men, affecting those he is speaking to in particular, but also humankind in general. (Foucault: 279) And King Henry is every bit the stock ‘unjust, tyrannical, sovereign’ (Foucault: 282), against which Maleficent as Cynic-sovereign must pit herself, as the king’s coughing and wheezing, deathbed speech illustrates: When I ascended to the throne I promised the people that one day I would take the Moors and its treasures. Each of you swore allegiance to me and to that cause. Defeated in battle? Is that to be my legacy?..Kill the wing-ed creature. Avenge me! And upon my death you will take the crown. ‘You are no king to me’ is Maleficent’s defiant retort as the armour-clad, horse mounted Henry leads a massed army into battle, set on ‘crush[ing]’ the ‘mysterious Moors’. ‘This stance of the Cynic as anti-king king, as the true king who, by the very truth of his monarchy, denounces and reveals the illusion of political kingship, is very important in Cynicism’ writes Foucault (Foucault: 275). Maleficent’s exchange with Henry is highly redolent of the encounter between the founder Cynic thinker, Diogenes, and the political king, Alexander. Like Alexander, Henry is ‘a king, a king of the world, a political king…To exercise his monarchy he needs an army, guards, allies, he needs armor (he appears with his sword)’ (Foucault: 276). And, as the philosopher-monarch; the Cynic-monarch, Maleficent is - to paraphrase Foucault - the perpetual, immutable, and true sovereign. Her Diogenes-like role is to show ‘how hollow, illusory, and precarious the monarchy of kings is’ and, so something which, as Cynic-sovereign, Maleficent must struggle against ‘in humanity, in relation to humanity, and for the whole of humanity’. (Foucault: 275; 280). Consequently ‘there is a physical interventionism, a social interventionism of the Cynics’ (Foucault: 279) - a point that will be returned to later - since, in defeating the tyrannical king, Maleficent contributes to the critique of patriarchy which, as we have seen, endures at the heart of neoliberalism.Maleficent, The Sleeping Beauty, and the brazen Cynic lifeThe Cynic’s struggle for and with humanity should not, however, be mistaken for attachment to the exemplary, or even decorous, life. For ‘indifference to the opinion of others and to the structures of power and its representatives…found in Cynicism’ (Foucault: 318) and typified by Maleficent too, results in the no less Cynic capacity for the unconcealed, ultimately scandalous, life. The brazen, scandalous life is made most manifest in Maleficent’s Christening scene. As the pivotal moment in the film’s narrative arc, it is also the scene that is most faithful to the 1959 Disney Sleeping Beauty animation. Indeed, for Jolie, it was the most daunting scene in the movie to build dramatically, precisely because of its heavy indebtedness to the 1959 original (Maleficent press conference). This, in turn, would indicate that the Cynic perspective articulated in this scene in Maleficent was embedded in the earlier film too. The roots of Maleficent’s articulation of Cynic thinking, then, extend at least as far back as the 1959 Sleeping Beauty. And in its turn, that film’s handling of the Christening scene is strikingly close to the way in which this scene is treated in ballet’s staging of the fairy tale. Cyril Beaumont remembers how, in the ‘magnificent first scene of the Christening’ in The Sleeping Princess, the Ballets Russes’ 1921-1922 full length version of The Sleeping Beauty, performed in London only, ‘life moved at a stately pace until suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the Wicked Fairy [i.e. Carabosse], who arrived in her coach drawn by rats. But she, too, had dignity, she was majestic even in her wrath’ (italics are the present writer’s). Judging by Beaumont’s recollection, it seems that Enrico Cecchetti, in re-creating, for Diaghilev’s London version, the role of Carabosse which he had first performed in the original 1890 St. Petersburg production, honoured the familiar Cynic conjunction of sovereignty and brazenness. Like the Cynic who ‘heads for all the big public gatherings’ (Foucault: 254), and as Carabosse had done before her, Maleficent, in front of ‘all manner of people’ (Maleficent: narration) invited as guests to the Christening, shows characteristic Cynic brazenness in doing nothing to mask or temper her tempestuous, vengeful anger. Rather, ‘lost in hatred [of King Stefan] and revenge’ as Maleficent later recalls, she vents the full force of her suprahuman spleen by cursing the king’s innocent new-born child. This overt, uninhibited, and highly public display of anger and evil qualifies as stock Cynic behaviour for ‘[Cynic] non-concealment, far from being the resumption and acceptance of those traditional rules of propriety which mean that one would blush to commit evil before others, must be the blaze of the human being’s naturalness in full view of all. This blaze of the naturalness which scandalizes, which transforms into scandal the non-concealment of existence limited by traditional propriety, manifests itself in the famous Cynic behaviour.’ (Foucault: 254).Good and evil co-exist in Maleficent then, just as, in Cynic thinking, nature is construed as subject to the intrusion of human malevolence: ‘If there is something bad in us or if we do something bad, is this not [asks the Cynic] because men have added to nature with their habits, opinions and conventions?’(Foucault: 254). The characterisation of Maleficent in the Disney 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation also bears this out: ‘she rules over creatures who are perversions of the good animals of the forest and, most damningly, she uses magic for evil’ (Kelly: 197). And the live-action Maleficent continues, some five-plus decades later, to subscribe to this same Cynic position, as the closing lines of the film’s voice-over narration make clear. Here, the narrator - whose identity is only at this point revealed as the aged Aurora, a figure who is heard but never seen - reminds the viewer: ‘My kingdom was united not by hero or villain as legend had predicted, but by one who was both hero and villain. And her name was Maleficent.’ Deploying the philosophically important theme of non-concealment but freeing it from all the conventional principles, the philosophical life, in the hands of the Cynics, becomes, for Foucault, the vie autre, a ‘life that appears radically other than all other forms of life’ (Foucault: 255). Life becomes the ‘bios philosophikos’ (Foucault: 265), the philosophical - and so true - life, when it abandons all those accumulated conventions which, accruing to philosophical discourse, stood as obstacles in the path of the proper integration of the philosophical life with philosophical practice. Since ‘while loudly proclaiming that philosophy is fundamentally not just a form of discourse, but also a mode of life, Western philosophy [to quote Foucault]…progressively eliminated or at least neglected and marginalised the problem of this philosophical life , which to start with, however, it posited as inseparable from philosophical practice.’ (Foucault: 235). Cynicism interests Foucault ‘because it was both the most rudimentary and most radical form in which the question of this particular form of life, the philosophical life…was raised.’ (Foucault: 237). Maleficent, too, articulates this classically Cynic position. For if Cynicism, as described by Foucault, ‘tak[es] up the most traditional themes of classical philosophy’ and subjects them precisely to what Foucault terms a ‘sort of alteration, a sort of transvaluation’ (Foucault: 314; 253) it seems that the film follows the same process. The temporal sovereignty of ‘the human kingdom’, characterised in Maleficent by ‘folly’, ‘temptations’, ‘greed’ and ‘ambition’, is reversed by this process of transvaluation: kings Henry and Stefan are floored - quite literally - by the might of Maleficent’s true sovereignty as Cynic-monarch. Unconcealment - the open, entirely disclosed life - is similarly taken up by the film. But here again, Maleficent joins with Cynicism in ‘explod[ing] the code of propriety with which this principle remained, implicitly or explicitly, associated’ so that the unconcealed life becomes ‘the shameless life, the life in anaideia (the brazen life).’ (Foucault: 255).Cynicism and ‘Maleficent’ as the choreo-philosophical critique of neoliberalism The Cynic, stresses Foucault, is not some ‘forgotten figure in ancient philosophy, but an historical category which,..runs through the whole of western history’. Maleficent, it might be said, stands testament to the ongoing endurance of this ‘transhistorical Cynicism’ (Foucault: 174). For it is hard not to see Cynicism’s ‘idea of a mode of life as the irruptive, violent, scandalous manifestation of the truth [that] is and was part of revolutionary practice’ (Foucault: 183), working to inform Maleficent, freighting the film with some of its capacity to critique neoliberalism. Foucault, as Gros points out, ‘shows how this [Cynicism’s] other life is at the same time the criticism of the existing world and supports the call for “an other world (mondre autre).” The true life thus manifests itself as an other life giving rise to the demand for a different world.’ (Gros in Foucault: 354). Alert to Cynicism’s striking affinity, here, with revolutionary movements urging socio-political change, Foucault goes so far as to identify ‘[revolutionary] political practice since the nineteenth century’ as the second great medium of Cynicism in European culture (the first having been, for Foucault, Christianity, Medieval ‘asceticism and monasticism’ especially, though he sees ‘Christian Cynicism’ enduring into the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation movements as well) (Foucault: 186; 182; 183). Maleficent’s response to what the film’s narration terms ‘the greed of the human kingdom’ is emblematic of Foucault’s elision of Cynicism with political activism. Her call for a different world expressed, with characteristic Cynic dual emphasis on walking and on style of existence as the embodiment of the true life - ‘bearing witness by one’s life in the form of a style of existence’ (Foucault: 184) - is articulated with special force in one particular scene. Here, the figure of Maleficent, cloaked and with staff Diogenes-like in hand, courses purposefully through the landscape. Her path is lined, to either immediate side of her, by dry stone walls, the ubiquitous markers of rural territorial enclosure. Such is the power of Maleficent’s irruptive force that these walls dissolve, as if sucked into the vortex of a tornado. This scene, it might be said, makes tangible the extent to which witnessing truth, in the Cynic sense, involves ‘testimony given, manifested, and authenticated by an existence, a form of life in the most concrete and material sense of the word; bearing witness to the truth by and in one’s body, dress, mode of comportment, way of acting, reacting and comporting oneself. The very body of the truth is made possible in a certain style of life.’ (Foucault: 173). Literally combusting in her wake, the pulverised stones of the walls ascend in a plume behind Maleficent, as if they are an animated extension of her Cynic’s cloak. The film then cuts to a panoramic view of the Moors kingdom, revealing it, by contrast, to be entirely unencumbered by land boundaries; markers; or divisions, of any kind. Maleficent’s action – her revolutionary moment - renders the land of the human kingdom in similar terms; as a terrain untrammelled by human demarcation. Her combustive effect, resulting in demolition of the enclosure walls and transmutation of the landscape, is then, in a very literal sense, the ‘dissonant irruption of the “true life” in the midst of the chorus of lies and pretences, of accepted injustice and concealed iniquities [through which] the Cynic makes “an other world” loom up on the horizon, the advent of which would presuppose the transformation of the present world. This critique, presupposing a continuous work on self and an instruction to others, should be interpreted as a political task. And this “philosophical militancy,” as Foucault calls it, is even the noblest and highest politics: it is the great politeuesthai of Epictetus.’ (Gros in Foucault:354) The implications, for embodiment, of the Cynic scenario described here by Gros, are both unexpected, at least within the context of western philosophy, and highly relevant to this article’s concern with reading Maleficent as meaningful, choreo-philosophically rendered, critique of neoliberalism. They are unexpected in the sense that the Cynic’s much desired ‘dissonant irruption of the “true life”’ reverses the problematic status too often consigned to embodiment by - broadly speaking and with the notable exception of phenomenology - the conventional, governing orthodoxies of western philosophical thinking: As entrusted agent of transformation; much needed vessel for pursuit of the Cynic ‘true’ life, the body is, by contrast, no longer obstacle in the path to the philosophical life but rather the catalyst indispensable for its realisation. Indeed, according to Foucault, the ‘relationship of physical, corporal conformity…between the Cynic and truth,’ means that the Cynic is ‘the very being of the true, rendered visible through the body.’ (Foucault: 310). One dividend of a new, Foucault-enabled attentiveness to the subversive, Cynic potential routed via Carabosse, and extended another remove by the more fully historicised account of that character’s life story drawn in the figure of Maleficent, might be to encourage us, as dance scholars to return to, and re-evaluate, Foucault. For Cynicism, in Foucault’s understanding and extended analysis, relies upon a highly motile and ambulatory; agental rather than subjugated, notion of embodiment, one which at times also calls to mind a theatricalised, indeed dancing, body. Foucault repeatedly places emphasis, for instance, on the ‘Cynic’s body and comportment’; on how it is the job of the Cynic ‘to prove with the qualities of his [or her] body’ (Foucault: 310); on Cynicism as less ‘a doctrine’ and much more ‘an attitude, a way of being’ (Foucault: 178). Foucault’s many observations on Cynicism offered immediately above might bring into question; or be brought into useful dialogue with, Foucault’s supposed antipathy to dance and its close cognates; his apparent ‘anti-phenomenological perspective’ to quote dance anthropologist Sally Ann Ness (Ness: 23). This is something which the present author plans to write on more fully elsewhere.Cynicism’s reliance on embodiment, for its realisation, remains the focus here. For this has important implications for the sorts of claims which might be made for Maleficent as substantive, choreo-philosophically rendered critique of neoliberalism. As has already been demonstrated in some depth, Maleficent’s critique of neoliberalism relies heavily on the film’s staging of Cynic philosophy. It is the film’s perceived marked scope for neoliberal critique which remains this article’s central concern. And so it is relevant to demonstrate here, as the present discussion reaches its penultimate stages, the extent to which Cynicism, dance and cinema - the populist cinema epitomised by Maleficent especially – are in fact close correlates of one another. For this correlation is key, it will be suggested, for the establishment of Maleficent as the sort of secure platform required for mounting such effective critique. Choreography, cinema, dance and/as the embodiment of Cynic philosophyCynic philosophy, privileging embodiment and unconcealment, and dispensing with the capture of philosophy as text-based discourse in favour of philosophy as the lived life, is especially well correlated with dance and cinema. Much of this correlation has to do with the extent to which Cynicism is unusually well designed for articulation routed theatrically through the body. This is especially the case given that ‘the Cynic tradition…contains no, or very few, theoretical texts’ (Foucault: 202). ‘Generally speaking’ elaborates Gros, ‘they [the Cynics] neglected the art of writing…It is precisely this theoretical poverty that Foucault takes up in order to make Cynicism the pure movement of a radical revaluation of philosophical truth, placed in the context of praxis, test of life, and transformation of the world.’ (Gros in Foucault: 350-351). In view of this absence of textual supports on the one hand, and the emphasis placed on the lived life as the bios philosophikos, on the other, the ‘ principle of non-concealment’ becomes a guiding tenet of Cynic philosophy, as has already been seen. Non-concealment, in turn relies, according to Foucault on ‘dramatization’; that is, on ‘theatrical staging of the principle of non-concealment’. Indeed for Foucault, ‘by the very fact of this radicalization [that is – in the present writer’s understanding of Foucault - its rendering through the theatrical]’, ‘non-concealment…appears radically other and irreducible to all other lives’ (Foucault: 254). Cynicism, according to Foucault, ‘presents itself essentially as a certain form of parrhēsia, of truth telling, but which finds its instrument, its site, its point of emergence in the very life of the person who must thus manifest or speak the truth in the form of a manifestation of existence.’ (Foucault: 217) As, in this way, an embodied philosophy, Cynicism displays strong affinities with theatre generally and, given Cynicism’s emphasis on the body’s lived, in-the-world dimensions, with dance in particular. This same privileging of embodiment makes Cynicism’s cinematic representation especially viable. And if, on this basis, (Cynic) philosophy, dance and cinema are natural allies, this seems especially the case where Maleficent is concerned. No mere blank cinematic tablet for the inscription of Cynic values, Maleficent, on the grounds of its dance inheritance and its cinematic form – its popular cinema genre in particular - already seems to amount to a certain kind of practice of philosophy. Indeed when Maleficent is considered in light of Alain Badiou’s (actually highly dance-indebted even if this aspect is little acknowledged) arguments for cinema as philosophy, this film would already seem to qualify as choreo-philosophical. This is even before the film’s representation of values, values which - this article argues - are highly redolent of Cynic philosophy, is taken into account. According to Badiou, cinema’s claim to status as philosophy is staked on grounds to do with qualities that are intrinsic to cinema’s form: philosophy doesn’t have to produce the thinking of the work of art because the work of art thinks all by itself and produces truth. A film is a proposition in thought, a movement of thought, a thought connected, so to speak, to its artistic disposition. How does this thought exist and get transmitted? It’s transmitted through the experience of viewing the film, through its movement. It’s not what’s said in the film, it’s not how the plot is organised that count; it’s the very movement that transmits the film’s thought. It’s an individual element that’s transmitted by every important film, but it touches on a form of the universal. (Badiou, 2013a: 18)Of special significance for the notion of the choreo-philosophical suggested by this article, is the extent to which Badiou’s understanding of cinema as philosophy rests on what is, for him, cinema’s inescapably choreographic aspect. In this regard, it is relevant to note the use of the term ‘movement’ three times in the extract of Badiou’s writing reproduced here. Ironically, while Badiou’s thinking on dance, precluding the possibility of dance as art, has proved problematic for dance theory (see Clark, 2011), Badiou’s claims for cinema as philosophy seem to depend precisely on a perceived relationship between cinema and dance. In the context of Badiou’s understanding of cinema’s relationship with the other arts - a relationship on which, according to Badiou, cinema depends for its status as philosophy – it seems that dance is recognised as an art, a status Badiou otherwise denies to dance. Understanding cinema as ‘“the seventh art,” which defines it as having an intimate relationship with all the other arts’, Badiou emphasises that ‘the use of choreography is absolutely crucial as an intrinsic element of the [cinema’s] mise en scène.’ (Badiou, 2013a: 7). Badiou’s claims for cinema as philosophy rely very precisely, then, upon a willingness to recognise cinema’s motile, choreographic, indeed dancerly, dimension. The case made by this article for Maleficent as philosophy seems to gain further traction from the extent to which it chimes closely with the argument Alain Badiou makes for cinema as popular philosophy. This is even if, at first glance, the congruence - no less relevant to this article’s particular concerns - of Badiou’s arguments for cinema as popular philosophy with those Foucault makes for Cynicism as popular philosophy, seems more striking still. Both sets of congruence appear tenable in light of the conditions which, for Badiou, determine cinema’s ‘unique relationship with philosophy’. For the sake of clarity the status that cinema and Cynicism share as popular philosophy will be considered first. Badiou’s conception of cinema as ‘philosophical experiment’ rests on what he terms ‘the five ways of thinking cinema’ (Badiou, 2013b: 208). Third among these, is cinema’s relationship to the other arts. Here, Badiou has in mind how ‘cinema opens up all the arts, strips them of their aristocratic value…cinema is like the popularization of all the arts’ (Badiou, 2013b: 210). This is especially the case, according to Badiou, in view of the way that cinema, as the seventh art, that is the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, marks ‘the democratization of the other six.’ (Badiou, 2013b: 210). Cinema’s ‘democratic power’, therefore, lies ‘in its ability to “popularise” these arts and their Ideas’ (Ling: 47). According to Alex Ling, here lies a central crux in the case Badiou builds for ‘cinema’s affinity with philosophy’, since cinema, ‘like philosophy’, ‘is simply the “common” ground on which other artistic truths are re-presented and re-arranged’ (Ling: 47). For Badiou, ‘“after the philosophy of cinema must come – is already coming – philosophy as cinema”’ (Badiou quoted in Ling: 47). From this it also follows, writes Ling, that Badiou’s concept of ‘philosophy as cinema would mean not only the “active democratisation”…of artistic, scientific, amorous and political truths but also their subsequent popularisation. Hence Badiou’s promising allusion to the spectre of a “mass philosophy”.’ (Ling: 47). Foucault makes a remarkably similar claim for Cynicism: Possessing only an ‘entirely rudimentary’ doctrinal framework and ‘addressed to a wide and consequently not very cultured public’, Cynicism is, for Foucault, popular philosophy (Foucault: 202). In these accounts, Cynicism and cinema are both characterised by their populist tendencies and appeal; indeed it is precisely on the grounds of these democratising capacities that the claims for cinema as philosophy (Badiou), and for Cyncism as philosophy (Foucault), are respectively staked. It would seem, then, that the cases made here by Foucault and Badiou align closely. As has already been explored in some depth, the thematics explored in Maleficent closely coincide with the priorities of Cynic philosophy. And, Maleficent, by virtue of its cinematic form, is as axiomatic of Badiou’s notion of cinema as popular philosophy, as it is definitive of Foucault’s notion of Cynic philosophy, in terms of its thematics. Indeed the Disney film encapsulates, paradigmatically, the relationship which, for Badiou, structures the relationship between cinema and the arts more generally, and is intrinsic to the claims he makes for cinema as philosophy. For the Disney film involves Badiou’s ‘democratisation’ and ‘popularisation’ of the arts criterion for cinema-as-philosophy to a heightened degree. The 1959 Sleeping Beauty animation, for instance, brings Tchaikovsky’s music; ballet; versions of European, and especially Medieval and Renaissance, architecture, painting and visual culture, to new and massed audiences. With the emergence of home video in the 1980s, for instance, Disney sold three million copies of the Sleeping Beauty animation in 1986 alone. For Charles Solomon, ‘this is a film that says animation is art’ (Perfect Picture…). ‘Sleeping Beauty is like going to the symphony’ another Disney scholar observes: ‘you don’t have to get so heavily in[to] the story. It’s the same thing as enjoying great art. People buy art. They put it in their home. They enjoy looking at it every day. I find this movie very much like that.’ (Perfect Picture…). And fellow Disney historian Russell Schroeder points out that George Bruns’s Oscar-nominated arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ballet score for the 1959 Sleeping Beauty was ‘recorded in a state of the art studio in Germany’. The production values of Disney’s 1959 short film The Peter Tchaikovsky Story, itself conceived as a television tie-in to promote the upcoming Sleeping Beauty animation, were similarly geared to popularising the arts. In this vein The Peter Tchaikovsky Story included extended sections of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1953 film version of Swan Lake featuring Galina Ulanova. In terms of its concept, format and style, the programme owed much to Kompozitor Glinka, with several scenes reproducing, exactly, those of the film. This 1952 Soviet feature film, directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, who had earlier served as co-director on several of Sergei Eisenstein’s films, ‘became an international triumph’ and was released in the USA as Man of Music. Composer Glinka (Mitchell, 2004: 72-73). The Peter Tchaikovsky Story also drew on other strategies which, working in tandem with the Sleeping Beauty animation, democratised access to the arts: the programme presented itself as both television’s first stereo simulcast, requiring the assistance of local radio stations, and as television’s first widescreen presentation. Both of these features were ultimately geared to the screening, for television audiences, of those extended sections of the Sleeping Beauty animation which were included in the programme. Read through the lens of Badiou’s theory, cinema, then, and popular cinema especially, share with Cynicism an understanding of philosophy as necessarily democratic; accessible; and popular. The pantomime dance to which Carabosse and so, ultimately, also Maleficent, are so indebted is indexed to a no less Cynicism-dependent understanding of philosophy as popular; lived out in the world; performance-based; and subversive. It is to this indexing of pantomime dance with Cynicism that this article finally turns. Maleficent and Carabosse; pantomime dance and parrhēsia: a genealogy Mime functions for Carabosse as walking operates for Maleficent: as a habitual mode of embodiment and communication. Carabosse’s mime and Maleficent’s pedestrianism respectively amount to alternative forms of motility or physicality, ones adopted perforce, as the result - for both characters - of an acute personal trauma experienced in earlier life. A traumatic episode, implicitly acknowledged but unspecified in the ballet, consigns mime to Carabosse so that she becomes the only character in The Sleeping Beauty to whom virtuosic, danse d’école vocabularies of classical ballet are denied. In Maleficent’s case, the originating incident is elaborated upon: it is the violent loss of her wings that deprives Maleficent of her previous aerial motility – her vertiginous aerial dance every bit as virtuosic as classical ballet. In fact, viewed in this light, Maleficent’s pedestrianism can itself be read as the distilled residue of Carabosse’s danse d’école-deprived, and hence pedestrianized, mime. Maleficent’s powers of flight are only restored to her at an advanced stage in the film, when Aurora upturns the glass in which Stefan had encased the severed wings, thereby releasing these and their accompanying superhuman powers back to Maleficent. Empowered in this way, Maleficent, as the true Cynic sovereign, who has by now also become Aurora’s adoptive mother, is finally able to vanquish and dispatch King Stefan, Aurora’s bellicose, biological father. This present discussion, however, maintains its focus on Carabosse’s mime and Maleficent’s pedestrianism. Not only since these modalities of gesture and movement are respectively more representative of each character’s particular physicality, taken overall. But also because the potential for political subversion which, I hope to show, is as integral to Carabosse’s mime as it is inherent to Maleficent’s pedestrianism, goes some way towards making the case for dance’s capacity for critique. Demonstrating that the subversive potential for neoliberal critique realised in Maleficent is circuited via; and no less innate to, the Sleeping Beauty ballet, is significant not only for enhancing an understanding both of Disney’s two Sleeping Beauty films - one animated and the other live action - and of the ballet which inspired them: Drawing attention in this way to the radical tendencies encountered even in a dance work such as Sleeping Beauty, where they might not readily be expected, helps build the argument for dance’s capacity for socio-political critique more generally.If the role of Carabosse is highly and intrinsically relevant to any consideration of Maleficent, it is equally central to the case I have made elsewhere for viewing the original 1890 Mariinsky production of The Sleeping Beauty as a danced affirmation of contemporary Romanov tsarist rule, cast in the historical image of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Valois and Bourbon France. Viewed in this context, some inescapable and far reaching parallels seem to exist between Carabosse and Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589): Carabosse, as she is characterized in the original Russian 1890 production, is iconographically rendered in terms strikingly redolent of Catherine, the Italian-born wife of Henry II of Valois, King of France (1519-1559), who was subsequently dowager queen of early modern king of France during her sons’ extended regency. There is neither the scope nor the need to elaborate further on this reading and the symbolism which, it argues, both figures share. It is enough to say here that the same bellicose associations of war, massacre, and bloodshed fastened to the Catholic, foreign dowager queen by her French contemporaries – and by the Protestant factions within their midst especially – resonate very clearly in the havoc which Carabosse wreaks in the ballet. For her actions similarly commit the apparently lifeless bodies of Sleeping Beauty’s court society, like all the other subjects in the ballet’s kingdom, to a century of slumber. In summary, when viewed through the lens of nineteenth-century theatrical convention, Carabosse embodies the same associations of social strife, and potentially regicidal rebellion that had been attached to Catherine de’ Medici and which would, in turn, attach themselves to Maleficent also. Indeed, in Maleficent’s actual vanquishing of King Stefan, Carabosse’s regicidal tendencies from the ballet are, in effect, realised. In the case of Carabosse, social and civil unrest register, for instance, in the ‘irruptive’ quality of the chromatic scale through which Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty score characterises Carabosse musically; in her entrances which are customarily managed via stage left, and so redolent - for nineteenth-century audiences at least - of malevolence. They are detectable, as well, in the consistently en dedans direction of Carabosse’s movement, so that this is always turned in on itself and towards the body, rather than directed outwards, en dehors, and so in terms that would be more legible to the audience. Associations of strife and insurgency are palpable, too, in the grotesquerie embodied by Carabosse and her retinue of squabbling pages. They are discernible, as well, in the original creation of the role of Carabosse, in the 1890 Imperial Russian production, by (panto)mime artist and dancer Enrico Cecchetti. Created, in this way, by a male pantomime, the gender indeterminacy that results from casting the role en travesti arguably adds significantly to its subversive potential. As a consequence of its pantomime, travesty, and pedestrian dimensions, the role of Carabosse is freighted with the same associations of turmoil, social unrest, and potential for inducing counter-hegemonic insurgency familiar from Maleficent. Carabosse, then, articulates many of the same key values of Cynic philosophy - and to a strikingly similar extent - which Maleficent embodies. Indeed, this congruence is hardly surprising given that the role of Maleficent functions to furnish the character of Carabosse with her earlier life back story. According to Tim Scholl, for Sleeping Beauty’s original ballet librettist, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, in ‘building his libretto around Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant (1697)…Perrault was but a link in the chain of a legend that stretches back [at least] to The Saga of the Volsungs, the old Norse saga recorded in the thirteenth century…’ (Scholl: 34). In terms of chronological range, the same can be said of the conjunction of mime, travesty dance and political subversiveness embodied in the role of Carabosse: For this, too, arguably reaches much further back; even to as far back as the gendered indeterminacy and political instability configured in pantomime dance in the ancient Greek city-state and its Roman legatees. And from this it follows that the Cynic behaviours and philosophy which Maleficent ‘inherits’ from Carabosse ultimately extend back to ancient Greek pantomime dance also. This chronological reach should not come as a surprise. For the Cynic, according to Foucault is not a ‘forgotten figure in ancient philosophy, but an historical category which…runs through the whole of western history…this transhistorical Cynicism.’ (Foucault: 174). Pantomime dance was especially associated with civil disturbance and unrest - themes possessing particular Cynic significance as we have already seen - in the minds of Late Antique commentators such as Prokopios of Gaza and Anastosios, as Ruth Webb has demonstrated (Webb, 2006: 10; Webb, 2008: 147; 201). One stop in the inevitably complicated route of transmission between pantomime’s ancient prototype, incorporated as one kind of dance performance in late antiquity, and its nineteenth-century dance theatre mime variant, is Italian commedia dell’arte, a mediation of antique pantomime for the post-classical era Italian peninsula. Particularly in view of its early efforts at the codification of ‘a more uniform and standard language of gesture’, commedia dell’arte found lasting influence. Many of its ‘rules, principles and conventions…survived after its decline, being assimilated into drama, opera and ballet.’ (Poesio: 41). In a recent radio essay broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Day 2016, ‘historian, and former Reith lecturer’, Marina Warner, characterises present-day pantomime in terms strikingly similar to those in which its earlier, and especially dance indebted, variants are understood by this article. Pantomime is, for Warner, ‘a free arena for risqué caricature’. It features ‘evil villains…standing in for some of the ogres and tyrants prospering around the globe today’ and ‘actors adlibbing on the issues of our time from the back legs of a horse’. ‘Working in a very old forum for people’s speech’ continues Warner: ‘…the patent lesson of traditional pantomime is an important one and it goes to the heart of ideals about freedom of thought in a democracy. You can see beneath appearances and you can hear another story beneath the lines…while keeping [y]our hands cupped to shield the little candle of hope that new times are coming.’ (Warner, 2016). The pantomime most local to me, Richmond Theatre’s Christmas season Sleeping Beauty, whose December 2016 run ended as work on this article also drew to a close, bears out Warner’s reading: For, according to The Stage, the ‘biggest gag of the evening…[is] when she [Carabosse, played by Maureen Lipman] is transformed into an instantly recognisable [dinner party guest] facsimile of [British prime minister] Theresa May’ (Vale) issuing the shrill cry of ‘breadsticks mean breadsticks’. And ‘I Wanna Be Evil’, the signature number sung by this production’s Carabosse, articulates a stock Cynic sentiment. Carabosse, then, speaks parrhesiastic truth to power, at least for the theatre’s local Richmond Park constituency. For earlier the same month, this parliamentary seat had hosted a by-election fought and won by a candidate with a manifesto pledge to campaign for a parliamentary vote before the invocation of article 50, the trigger for a member state to withdraw from membership of the EU. British pantomime is a ‘migrant from the continent, for it was brought by Italian strolling players’ observes Warner (Warner, 2016). The retention, from the Tchaikovsky-Petipa Sleeping Beauty, of the names of Carabosse and that of her more benevolent alter ego, the Lilac Fairy, as those given to the bad and good fairies in the Richmond Theatre production, suggests that ballet, together with Warner’s ‘Italian strolling players’, has played an important role, in Britain at least, as international mediator of pantomime. And in the context of Carabosse’s mime-only pedestrianized theatrical language in the Tchaikovsky-Petipa Sleeping Beauty, the predominantly Italian associations which pantomime held in nineteenth-century ballet’s regard would have conveniently functioned as another theatrical marker of Catherine de’ Medici’s ‘outsider’, foreign status, particularly as she was an Italian from Medici Florence. These Italian associations of the Carabosse-Catherine de’ Medici mime role are ones that Cecchetti’s own Italian nationality, as a native of the Marches, would have amplified further still.The extent to which the subversive political strategies and pantomime dance practices, practices that Carabosse would inherit to such striking effect, had become closely intertwined with one another in the ancient Greek city-state and its Roman successor, is strikingly redolent of Cynic philosophy. The proliferation of these practices on the one hand, and the emergence of Cynic thinking, on the other, were, after all, contemporaneous with one another in Hellenistic Greece. In this context, the ‘mimes’ jokes (skommata) about political leaders’, were indicative of their ‘freedom of speech (parrhēsia)’ (Webb 2008: 118-119), just as, in that period, the same commitment to say all; to speak fearlessly of everything, was enshrined as centrally, in Cynic philosophy. As has already been pointed out, and as Webb’s equation of mime with parrhēsia also indicates, pantomime, with its origins in panto-mimesis and meaning literally to show; to represent, everything, is the close, dance cognate of Cynic parrhēsia; the compunction to say everything. The pantomimes’ potential ‘as a conduit for popular expression’; their ‘depictions of transgressions [that] shone a pitiless spotlight on the boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable in society’; so that the dancers’ ‘subverted and laid bare the conventions of society’ (Webb 2008: 119; 137) are also already familiar. For they call to mind Carabosse, Maleficent and these characters’ shared reliance upon embodied practices and theatricality. This reliance is very similar to that on which, according to Foucault, the Cynic articulation of societal critique also depended. The resulting associations cemented between ‘pantomime performance and civil strife’, and between the ‘dancer’ and ‘violence, [and] danger’, meant that, according to the commentary of Prokopios of Gaza, the pantomimes’ dances were indeed ‘a direct cause of civil strife’ (Webb, 2008: 147; 201). These same charges against the pantomime dancer were also levelled against the Cynic of course. And Carabosse is regarded similarly in The Sleeping Beauty; as a harbinger of social strife who, according to this ballet’s conceptual logic, must therefore - like her Cynic philosopher and pantomime dancer predecessors - be checked and contained. Much was also made by contemporaries of the gender indeterminacy of ancient Greek pantomimes; of their ability to take on female as well as male identities. A connection was drawn, on the basis of ‘the dancers’ indeterminate gender…between their disruption of nature and their audience’s disruption of nature and [ultimately] their audience’s disruption of civic order.’ (Webb, 2008: 201). This gender indeterminacy lives on, and is similarly politicised, in Carabosse. For, given that pantomime was seen as inherently transvestite in its original late antique Greek setting, some of these traces arguably spill over to extend and reinforce the complicated gender identification already invested in the role of Carabosse by its being played en travesti. Anxieties, triggered by the ancient Greek pantomime dancer’s practice of playing female roles, as well as the social construction of dance as a female activity, led, Ruth Webb suggests, to something akin to a state of moral panic over the gendered indeterminacy of the pantomime dancer’s body. Negative discussions of pantomime, were ‘expressed most clearly in terms of the dancer’s refusal to adhere to “natural” gender categories’ (Webb, 2006: 9). The root of the concern for commentators such as Amphilochios lay, according to Webb, in the ‘highly unstable nature of the pantomime dancer’s body’: As the dancers ‘taking on female roles…don’t become female in a biological sense’ the dancer is left ‘in a limbo, caught between the natural state of masculinity and the inaccessible state of femininity.’ (Webb, 2006: 9-10). Prokopios played up ‘the association between civic disturbance and the pantomimes’ performances’: ‘His reasoning is as follows [writes Webb]: dancers impersonated women, their acts stirred up the crowds, from whence (hothen) there were riots.’ (Webb, 2006: 10). In this way, Webb argues, ‘the overturning of natural distinctions – the natural order – within the dancers’ bodies is mirrored by the overturning of the natural order in the cities, i.e. in violence and strife.’ (Webb, 2006: 10). Beyond this propensity for subverting societal norms through strategies that relied upon a particularly embodied notion of performativity, pantomime dancers shared other Cynic-like traits. These included the possession of populist rather than intellectual appeal. For pantomime dancers, possibly due to the particularly embodied nature of their performance, suffered the same lack of prestige experienced by Cynic thinkers: ‘[ancient Greek and Roman] mime and pantomime dance, in their reliance on gesture and visual spectacle…largely failed to gain respect among the intellectual elite in their own periods.’ (Webb, 2008: 222). The same equation of gender impersonation with potential for insurgency familiar from pantomime dance, lives on in the conjunction of travesty and riotous insurgency embodied in the figure of Carabosse. In the case of Maleficent, this character’s disruption of gender norms manifests itself in her initial rejection of conventional maternalism rather than in the adoption of travesty performance per se. Other traits, no less central to Cynic thinking and equally encountered in the performance of pantomime dancers, live on also, in the characterisation of Carabosse and Maleficent. For instance, following the precedent set by the Cynic-like pantomime dancers, Carabosse and Maleficent do not shirk speaking truth to power, fearlessly and when they deem that circumstances dictate - disruptively. According to pragmatic philosopher Richard Shusterman:Philosophy should be transformational instead of foundational. Rather than a metascience for grounding our current cognitive and cultural activities, it should be cultural criticism that aims to reconstruct our practices so as to improve the experienced quality of our lives. Improved experience, not originary truth, is the ultimate philosophical goal and criterion.’ (Shusterman quoted in Decker, 96) While one might wish for a more conciliatory and productive dialogue between pragmatic and other forms of philosophy - i.e. analytic - than Shusterman seems prepared to countenance, the role which he envisages for philosophy is salient here. For Malificent, this article has tried to suggest, is ‘cultural criticism that aims to reconstruct our practices so as to improve the experienced quality of our lives’. The embodiment, in the figure of the film’s titular character, of Cynicism with its ‘little importance in the history of doctrines. Considerable importance in the history of arts of living and the history of philosophy as mode of life’ to quote Foucault (Foucault: 315), is intrinsic to this process. Maleficent, then, would seem to fulfil, paradigmatically, the definition of philosophy as this is formulated by Shusterman and other pragmatic thinkers. Indeed a genealogical analysis of the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent suggests that there is little that is coincidental between the configuration of Carabosse as a mime role, and the sorts of socio-political thematics which this role explores and stages for the audience. This resulting raised awareness in turn paves the way for establishing affiliations between the sorts of dance lineages inherited, via ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty, by Maleficent on the one hand, and Cynicism, as a particularly embodied philosophy, on the other. Engaging with Cynic philosophy through dance in this way enables Maleficent not only to enter into some substantive, extended, and innovative critique of neoliberalism. It also enables this recent, cinematic- and therefore particularly widely circulated - evocation of ballet’s Carabosse to escape those stock readings of the female body as first and foremost ‘natural’ and fecund, to be tamed by masculinist regimes of enclosure. Cynic philosophy, therefore, allows for the identification of Maleficent with nature while at the same time resisting and overcoming the regimes of biological essentialism according to which nature has consistently been gendered in western accounts of landscape. These stances adopted by Maleficent, in their manifest forms of ‘indifference…to the [exact same] structures of power and its representatives that are [in other words, as are] found in Cynicism’ (Foucault: 318) are, of course, in and of themselves the articulation of a classically Cynic position. That these are the achievements of a female character, an ostensibly evil one at that, who is drawn, ultimately, from a ballet all too often acknowledged only to be dismissed as quickly, as variously anodyne; narrative-poor; or as an exhaustive dance primer of a certain kind, might be especially worthy of pause and comment. For one thing, they invite us to look again, with fresh eyes, at the final words of narration in Maleficent’s closing moments. When the last, ‘so you see, the story was not quite as you were told’, line of Woolverton’s screenplay is re-considered in this light, it not only sounds an invitation to re-visit a time-worn fairy tale. It stands, too, as a call to re-evaluate a ballet whose guardianship - through its characterisation of Carabosse - of pantomime dance’s socio-political subversive potential, reaching far back to ancient Greece, has endured for some century and a quarter. A guardianship that, for all the apparent familiarity of The Sleeping Beauty as a ballet, has somehow hitherto passed unnoticed and unremarked upon. Critical Disney Studies, then, not only ushers in, but also cedes important ground to; directs the spotlight on, dance studies. A dance studies newly attuned, that is, to the capacity of a dance work such as The Sleeping Beauty to articulate complex philosophical concepts and critical frames through its thematic and aesthetic armature, and to generate subsequent ones, i.e. those articulated in Maleficent. That this capacity has thus far passed largely unacknowledged even in a dance work perceived to be as intrinsically bound up with western dance theatre as The Sleeping Beauty, might in itself suggest this line of enquiry as one which, capable of broader application, is worth pursuing. 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