Text as Dance

Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque

Mark Franko (Temple University, USA)

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
23 January 2025

Performance art; Theatre Studies

This book offers a groundbreaking investigation into issues of

gender, power and the representation of sovereignty in

French Baroque court ballet – and in today’s performances

that recall them.

Mark Franko uses powerful interpretive tools derived from

historiography and critical theory, especially the work of

German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, to offer the

reader both a historical and a theoretical interpretation of this

genre of dance in France (c. 1615–1654), as well as its

aftermath and legacy today.

Through doing so, he reaches conclusions about how

sovereignty and power were both perceived by viewers at the

time and how they were represented through dance, given

that it was the noble class who devised and performed court

ballets. He enquires into the role of choreography and

theatricality as potentially critical forces operating at the heart

of sovereignty.

Franko places the work of Louis Marin on power,

representation and movement in French Baroque painting

and performance in juxtaposition to that of Benjamin on

theater. Other historians whose work is prominent in this

study are Ernst Kantorowicz, Michel Foucault and José

Antonio Maravall.

With wide breadth in the work of historians, philosophers,

political scientists, critical theorists, musicologists and dance

historians, this is the culmination of a career’s-worth of

scholarship and research in the field.

By: Mark Franko (Temple University USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 218mm, Width: 146mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 440g
ISBN: 9781350236882
ISBN 10: 1350236888
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 23 January 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Mark Franko is the Laura H. Carnell Professor in the Department of Dance at the Boyer School of Music and Dance, Temple University, USA. Prior to this, he was Professor of Dance and Chair of the Theater Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. He is the author of Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment (2018), The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: French Interwar Dance and the German Occupation (2020), among other books.

Reviews for Text as Dance: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque

"""In this magisterial contribution to dance and performance studies, Mark Franko builds on the views of the Baroque by Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, and Michel Foucault to provide a new perspective on the interplay between movement, body, language, and voice occurring on early modern stages. The study culminates in a spectacular reading of William Forsythe's pioneering Artefact offering a powerful critical vocabulary to interpret postmodern ballet and its critique of dance history."" --Mauro Calcagno, Associate Professor of Music and Italian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA"