Mark Franko

Text as Dance

Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Clever Fox Publishing
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. Januar 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 454g
• ISBN-13: 9781350236882
• ISBN-10: 1350236888
• Artikelnr.: 68930285

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction 1. The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of
Interpretation in Walter Benjamin's "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" -
Symbol/Allegory - History as setting, prop and sign(language) - Conclusion
2. Fragment of the Sovereign as Hermaphrodite: Time, History and the
Exception in Le Ballet de Madame - The Political Context of Le Ballet de
Madame in 1615 - The King's Two Bodies, Allegory and Bare Life 3. Majestic
Drag: Monarchical Performativity and the King's Body Theatrical 4. Figural
Inversions of the King's Body 5. The Role of Theatricality in the Critique
of Spectacle Bibliography Index