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. 1615–165...

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment brings together a cross-section of artists and scholars engaged with the phenomenon of reenactment in dance from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Synthesizing myriad views on danced reenactment and the manner in which this branch of choreographic performance intersects with important cultural concerns around appropriation this Handbook addresses originality, plagiarism, historicity, and spatiality as it relates to cultur...

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1573, that spans the late Renaissance and early baroque. Utilizing aesthetic and ideological criteria, author Mark Franko analyzes court ballet librettos, contemporary performance theory, and related commentary on dance and movement in the literature of this period. Examining the formal choreographic apparatus that characterizes ...

In the much-anticipated update to a classic in dance studies, Mark Franko analyzes the political aspects of North American modern dance in the 20****th century.A revisionary account of the evolution of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics features a foreword by Juan Ignacio Vallejos on Franko's career, a new preface, a new chapter on Yvonne Rainer, and an appendix of left-wing dance theory articles ...

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography problematizes the absence of the dancing body in treatises in order to reconstruct it through a series of intertextual readings triggered by Thoinot Arbeau’s definition of dance in his 1589 dance treatise, Orchesographie. The notion of the intertext as elaborated by Michael Riffaterre is used to understand a series of relationships between dance and other activities within which the historical dancing body emerges to the light ...

Often called the Picasso, Stravinsky, or Frank Lloyd Wright of the dance world, Martha Graham revolutionized ballet stages across the globe. Using newly discovered archival sources, award-winning choreographer and dance historian Mark Franko reframes Graham's most famous creations, those from the World War II era, by restoring their rich historical and personal context. Graham matured as an artist during the global crisis of fascism, the conflict of World War II, and the post-war period th...

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, L...

I Want to Go to Heaven but I Don’t Want to DieBy: Mark FrankoTake a journey though author Mark Franko’s observations and inspirations in I Want to God to Heaven but I Don’t Want to Die, his collection that displays many themes, including the great and mysterious God, and faith, and family and friends.About the AuthorMark Franko is a graduate of Wichita State University, with a B.S. in Medical Technology. He worked 34 years in the laboratory profession and is...

Choreographing Discourses brings together essays originally published by Mark Franko between 1996 and the contemporary moment. Assembling these essays from international, sometimes untranslated sources and curating their relationship to a rapidly changing field, this Reader offers an important resource in the dynamic scholarly fields of Dance and Performance Studies.What makes this volume especially appropriate for undergraduate and graduate teaching is its critical focus on twenti...

Ritual today can be encountered in the midst of catastrophic and transforming events. This collection reassesses and revises traditionally understood relationships between ritual and politics, ritual and everyday life, ritual and art making, and ritual and disaster. The methodologies as well as the subject matter are interdisciplinary: they range from the anthropological to the art and dance historical, from the theatrical and literary to the linguistic, philosophical, and psychoanalytic. ...

In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occita...

The turning point of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert memorably set at the opera, is only the most famous example of a surprisingly long tradition, one common to a range of French literary styles and sub-genres. In the first book-length study of that tradition to appear in English, Cormac Newark examines representations of operatic performance from Balzac's La Comédie humaine to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, by way of (among others) Dumas père's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Leroux's...