Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body is a historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet of the late Renaissance and early baroque. Franko's analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to resituate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context. He reveals the ideological tensions underlying experiments with autonomous dance in the early modern.

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 late Valois and early Bourbon ballet spectacle, Franko postulates that the evolving aesthetic ultimately reflected the political situation of the noble class, which devised and performed court ballets. He shows how the body emerged from verbal theater as a self-sufficient text whose autonomy had varied ideological connotations, most important among which was the expression of noble resistance to the increasingly absolutist monarchy. Frankos analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to resituate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context. Dance as Text thus provides a picture of the complex theoretical underpinnings of composite spectacle, the ideological tensions underlying experiments with autonomous dance, and finally, the subversiveness of Molieres use of court ballet traditions.

A groundbreaking investigation into issues of gender, power and representation of sovereignty in French Baroque dance repertoires -- in particular, court ballet -- and in today's performances of 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. 1600-1750), 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. Other thinkers whose work is interrogated to further our understanding of the performance of power in French Baroque court ballet include: Ernst Kantorowicz, Judith Butler, Louis Marin, Eric Auerbach, Georgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Debord, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault With wide breadth, and work by historians, philosophers, political scientist, critical theorists, musicologists and dance historians, this is the culmination of a career's-worth of scholarship and research in the field.

"... almost every page offers provocative commentary on the aesthetics and politics of modern dance." -- Signs "... [an] important step... in the ineluctable dance by postmodern historians across a bridge that spans the gaps among disciplines, between theory and practice, and betweeen present and past." -- Theatre Journal "This complex and important book needs to be read by anyone interested in dance history or the cultural politics of dance." -- Dance Theatre Journal "Mark Franko's Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics is challenging, groundbreaking, insightful, and, I believe, an important contribution to the field of dance scholarship." -- Dance Research Journal A revisionary account of the evolution of "modern dance" in which Mark Franko calls for a historicization of aesthetics that considers the often-ignored political dimension of expressive action. Includes an appendix of articles of left-wing dance theory, which flourished during the 1930s.

Starting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing.

Franko's analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to resituate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context. Dance as Text thus provides a picture of the complex theoretical underpinnings of composite spectacle, the ideological tensions underlying experiments with autonomous dance, and finally, the subversiveness of Moliere's use of court ballet traditions.

This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which writing relates to corporeality and how the two work together to create, resist or mark the body of the "Other." Contributors draw on varied backgrounds to examine different movement practices. They focus on movement as a meaning-making process, including the choreographic act of writing. The challenges faced by marginalized bodies are discussed, along with the ability of a body to question, contest and re-write historical narratives.