Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin, and Choreographies of the Baroque: Movement, Gender and Power in Court Ballet

＂A groundbreaking investigation of issues of gender, power and representation of sovereignty in French Baroque dance repertoires - in particular, court ballet - and in today’s performances of them. The author 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 period of dance in France (c. 1600-1750), as well as its aftermath and legacy today＂--

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. 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.