Exploring the significance of the palace and gardens of Versailles, Graafland superimposes the choreography of Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx upon the gardens of Le Nôtre and the French Sun King. He analyses the geometric character of the human body in the ’Balet Comique’ and compares layout and ballet as a mechanics of power in an early symbolic state.

Exploring the significance of the palace and gardens of Versailles, Graafland superimposes the choreography of Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx upon the gardens of Le Nôtre and the French Sun King. He analyses the geometric character of the human body in the ’Balet Comique’ and compares layout and ballet as a mechanics of power in an early symbolic state. Graafland has added the ballet structure, a framework that tells us about the desires of this period. These in turn tell us much about French society at that time. This is the second book by Graafland (the first was Architectural Bodies) to address the role of the human body in architecture.