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

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Problem of the Baroque in Trans-historical Perspective Chapter 1: The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of Interpretation in Walter Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” Chapter 2: Between Sacrality and Perspectivalism: Theories of Spectatorship in Jose´ Antonio Maravall and Louis Marin Chapter 3: The Problem Ballets: Theatricality and The Paradox of Sovereignty Chapter 4: The Melancholy of Figurability: Marin with Benjamin and the Allegory of Absolutism Chapter 5: “A Subtle System of Feints”: Phenomenological Description and Theatricality in Michel Foucault’s “Las Meninas” Chapter 6: The Language Model in William Forsythe’s Artifact Notes Bibliography: Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
No one who engages academically with dance can ignore Mark Franko … Another standard work! 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.