Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque BodyDance 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. |
Contents
Constructing the Baroque Body | 1 |
Writing Dancing1573 | 15 |
Ut Vox Corpus1581 | 31 |
Interlude Montaignes Dance1580s | 51 |
Political Erotics of Burlesque Ballet16241627 | 62 |
Molière and Textual Closure ComedyBallet16611670 | 107 |
Repeatability Reconstruction and Beyond | 131 |
Notes on Characters of Dance | 153 |
Original Text and Translation of Les Fées 1625 | 158 |
Original Text and Translation of Lettres Patentes 1962 | 165 |
The Amerindian in French Humanist and Burlesque Court Ballets | 183 |
Notes | 189 |
225 | |
239 | |
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Common terms and phrases
action aesthetic audience autonomy autres Bakhtin Balet comique Ballet de cour baroque baroque dance bien body’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme branle burlesque ballet c’est carnivalesque choreographic comedy construction context costume court ballet courtier cultural d’une Dance as Text dance history dancers dancing body Danse Diderot dramatic entrée estre Fâcheux fait fantasmata Fées des forests figure forests de Saint France French genre geometrical dance gesture grand ballet grotesque Guillaume harmony historical historical dance Ibid ideological interlude Jean Jourdain king king’s Kleist L’Art l’on Lacroix late Renaissance Letters Patent libretto Lippe Louis XIII Louis XIV mannerist marionette Mark Franko mascarade McGowan Molière Molière’s comedy-ballets Montaigne Montaigne’s movement Musique narrative noble nymphs Oskar Schlemmer Paris pattern performance play political present qu’elle qu’il qu’on récit reconstruction Renaissance dance rhetorical royal satire Schlemmer seventeenth century social dance space term textual theater theatrical theory theoretical tout University Press Valois Violin visual