Power, Choreography, and Gymnastics: Assembling the Ideal Citizen through Bodily Practices to Consolidate Power

This paper offers a historical overview of how different regimes have shaped the ideal citizen through bodily practices incorporated into educational projects, focusing on elements of cultural training such as dance and gymnastics. Through a comparative historical approach, this study reveals key patterns in the construction of the ideal citizen through bodily practices and explores how the body has been used as a tool for expression, control and social transformation. The cases analyzed cover a broad ideological and chronological range, facilitating a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, including Ancient Greece, the French Revolution, the National Socialist and Marxist-Leninist regimes, as well as Bolivia’s transformations in the 1950s and the government of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS-IPSP[1]) from 2009 to 2019. Additionally, the article includes audiovisual sources accessible via links, which enable readers to visually engage with the historical material and thereby enrich their comprehension of the issues analyzed. This study builds upon and expands a section of a broader research project entitled The Choreography of Power: An Analysis of Patriotic Spectacles through the Bolivian Case, which examines highly planned and choreographed patriotic spectacles designed to exalt the image, narrative, and authority of specific governments or nations.