For Americans my age or older, Ravel’s Boléro will always be the music of Blake Edwards’ film “10,” which came out in 1979. Starring Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, the romantic comedy introduced Bo Derek, she of the braids and breasts, to the world. Thanks to Bo and Blake, Boléro came to be associated with sex of the pure fucking sort, so much so that Allan Bloom singled the music out for criticism (along with “rock ‘n roll”) in The Closing of the American Mind. More innocent times, those were.

Last night, at the New York City Center, my daughter and I saw Boléro performed as a ballet. A ballet is what the music was originally commissioned as, but it’s rarely performed that way anymore. It’s more often heard simply as an orchestral piece. The choreography was done by Maurice Béjart, who was born in Marseilles in 1927, and so, I assume, lived under Vichy in the 1940s. Hugo Marchand was the lead dancer, along with the Béjart Ballet in Lausanne, where I was just traveling last month.

The performance came as a revelation to me, one of those moments that irreversibly shape how you will see and experience a text or piece of music forever after (much like “10” did for me in the early 1980s, when I saw it on cable).

All the dancers were male, all wore black pants, with no top. Marchand, as the lead dancer, was on a platform of sorts, about six feet above the ground and above the other dancers. The music and a small light opened on him, solely on him, dancing tentatively to the melody. The other dancers were gathered as a square around him, sitting in chairs, below the platform on which he was dancing.

At first, it seemed like a nightclub. One dancer up high, everyone else below. But as the music proceeded, it became clear that we were somewhere else. Or maybe not.

The other dancers began to join in, in groups of four or so. Where Marchand kept dancing to the melody, these other dancers took up at that monotonous, mechanical rhythm line. Where Marchand moved in ever larger swoops and swirls, they moved in strict 90 degree motion, with an occasional circle or two. He was all gesture and freedom, they were all martinet and minimalism.

It soon became clear that we were listening not to the accompaniment to an x-rated film but to the music of a marching fascism. The costume choices, black pants and white skin, suddenly leapt into view as the uniforms of the SS, much the way Susan Sontag singled out those black Hugo Boss outfits for discussion in her pioneering essay “Fascinating Fascism.” The relationship between the alluring melody and the relentless, unchanging rhythm—visualized as the lead dancer and the surrounding, adoring troupe—came to sound like that between leader and led in the age of mechanical reproduction (or, I hate to say it, like an excerpt from Adorno’s problematic essay on jazz.) It also reminded me of the way that innocent tune in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony quickly turns into the terrifying screech of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

The setting of a night club turned fascist rally also became legible—not only as yet another version of the Cabaret story (the Kander and Ebb musical came out after this particular version of Boléro premiered), a reference my daughter caught, but also as a way of weaving the necessary erotic threads into the fabric of fascism.

The fact that Béjart, the choreographer, as I said, whose first performance of Boléro premiered in 1961, grew up in Vichy France seems not unimportant. Also, the fact that another piece of music by Ravel, La Valse, has been read as the score for the spectacular crack-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the last days of the First World War, also seems not unimportant.

But also…Sontag’s essay on fascism came out in 1975. The Blake Edwards film came out in 1979. Sontag didn’t talk about Boléro or Ravel in that essay, but she did talk a lot about homoeroticism and fascism. She got criticized for that. Which made me wonder. When Blake Edwards used the music as the background noise of a heterosexual romantic comedy, it was associated with pure eroticism (and lousy art). When Béjart uses it as the accompaniment for a highly charged homoerotic piece of art, it conjures pure fascism.