Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905-86) is recognized both as the modernizer of French ballet in the twentieth century and as the keeper of the flame of the classical tradition upon which the glory of French ballet was founded. Having migrated to France from Russia in 1923 to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Lifar was appointed star dancer and ballet director at the Paris Opéra in 1930. Despite being rather unpopular with the French press at the start of his appointment, Lifar came to dominate the Parisian dance scene-through his publications as well as his dancing and choreography-until the end of the Second World War, reaching the height of his fame under the German occupation of Paris (1940-44). Rumors of his collaborationism having remained inconclusive throughout the postwar era, Lifar retired in 1958. This book not only reassesses Lifar's career, both aesthetically and politically, but also provides a broader reevaluation of the situation of dance-specifically balletic neoclassicism-in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar's collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade. In examining the political significance of the critical discussion of Lifar's body and technique, author Mark Franko provides the ground upon which to understand the narcissistic and heroic images of Lifar in the 1930s as prefiguring the role he would play in the occupation. Through extensive archival research into unpublished documents of the era, police reports, the transcript of his postwar trial and rarely cited newspaper columns Lifar wrote, Franko reconstructs the dancer's political activities, political convictions, and political ambitions during the Occupation.
Foreword Frédéric Pouillaude Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: The Transnational Path Toward Corporeal Fascism Chapter One: A Genealogy of Dance Modernity: Movement Artifacts, Mythic Principles, and Archival Others Chapter Two: The Critical Reception of Serge Lifar (1929-1939) Chapter Three: The Dancer as Statue and the Geo-Politics of Neoclassicism Chapter Four: Parade as a Critical Concept in Interwar Dance Theory: from Jean Cocteau and Paul Valéry to André Varagnac Chapter Five: Serge Lifar and the Question of Collaboration with the German Authorities under the Occupation of Paris (1940-1949) Chapter Six: From the Neoclassical Turn to the Baroque Re-turn Selected Bibliography Index
Mark Franko is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University. His most recent books are Choreograping Discourses: A Mark Franko Reader (2019), and (editor) The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (2017). He was editor of Dance Research Journal and he is founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series. Franko received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2018-19 to complete this book.
Reviews for The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: Interwar French Ballet and the German Occupation
Serge Lifar, star dancer and director of the Paris Opera, notoriously thrived under the German occupation of France during 1940-1944. Mark Franko examines this matter authoritatively and evaluates Lifar's contribution to the evolution of ballet in modern France. -- Robert O. Paxton, Columbia University Franko's new book is both provocative and brilliantly researched, offering a re-thinking of Lifar's life and work while re-shaping received perceptions of French modernism and conventional accounts of what constitutes 'neoclassicism' in dance. The book is ambitious and ground-breaking and situates dance theory and dance history in direct relation to the exigencies of political power. -- Susan Jones, University of Oxford
