Dance as Text
Dance as Text
Out of Print
Dance as Text is an historical and theoretical examination of French court ballet over a hundred-year period, beginning in 1573, that spans the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Utilising aesthetic and ideological criteria, Mark Franko analyses 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 characterises late Valois and early Bourbon ballet spectacle, Franko argues that the evolving aesthetic ultimately reflected the political situation of the noble class, who devised and performed court ballets. Franko's analysis blends archival research with critical and cultural theory in order to re-situate the burlesque tradition in its politically volatile context.
Product details
July 1993Hardback
9780521433921
260 pages
262 × 208 × 19 mm
0.88kg
35 b/w illus.
Unavailable - out of print October 1998
Table of Contents
- Prologue: constructing the Baroque body
- 1. Writing dancing (1573)
- 2. Ut vox corpus (1581)
- 3. Interlude: Montaigne's dance (1580s)
- 4. Political erotics of burlesque ballet (1624–1627)
- 5. Moliere and textual closure: comedy-ballet (1661–1670)
- Epilogue: Repeatability, reconstruction and beyond
- Appendix 1. Notes on 'characters of dance'
- Appendix 2. Les Fees des Forests de Saint Germain: Synopsis
- Appendix 3. Lettres patentes pour L'Etablissement d'une Academie de Danse (1662)
- Appendix 4. The critical import of the Amerindian in French humanist and burlesque court ballets
- 5. Endnotes
- Bibliography.
