Genealogy and Event in the Work of Mark Franko

VALLEJOS, JUAN IGNACIO

Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics

Indiana University Press

Año: 2023; p. 8 - 25

Mark Franko’s first book, published in 1986 and entitled The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (c. 1416–1589), focuses on the semiotic analysis of Renaissance dance treatises and gives an account of a foundational moment in the theatricality of the dancing body in the West. Several years later, in 1993, he published one of his most widely impacting books, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, which analyzes seventeenth-century French Baroque dance, focusing in particular on the emergence of a dancing body that manages to free itself of the theatrical discourse of its origins to form a body-text. In this work, we see the political dimension starting to become a focal point, acting as a “structural axis. Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics was published two years later, in 1995, and was Mark’s first monograph on North American modern dance, which, to a certain extent, became his main topic of research. Two of his later books can be seen as stemming from this original work; one is The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s, published in 2002, the first draft of which can be found in chapter 2 of this book, and the other his monograph on Martha Graham entitled Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work, published in 2012, which further develops the analysis proposed in chapter 3. In between these two publications, Mark published another book that, in a way, opened up a new area in his research. It was Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance, from 2005, in which he drew on both his career as a researcher and his experience as a dancer and choreographer (he was part of the Sanasardo company between 1964 and 1969). This book approached the relationship between theory and practice, a theme also present in his 1995 work, in a unique way. It could thus be argued that Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics represents a kind of meeting point of multiple themes developed in his subsequent research on modern dance, but at the same time the text offers a broad historical perspective that takes in his previous studies on Baroque and Renaissance dance. In this sense, the book provides an entry point to a fundamental body of work on varying topics and diverse historical periods, which decisively influenced the global development of Dance Studies in academia. My contribution will be to emphasize certain elements of his analysis that I regard as central and to propose a reassessment of the weight of Foucauldian historiography in Mark’s work through two concepts that, despite not occupying a central position in his considerations, to my mind function as implicit foundations in his work: the concepts of genealogy and event.