Choreographing Discourses: A Mark Franko Reader

Choreographing Discourses brings together essays originally published by Mark Franko between 1996 and the contemporary moment. Assembling these essays from international, sometimes untranslated sources and curating their relationship to a rapidly changing field, this Reader offers an important resource in the dynamic scholarly fields of Dance and Performance Studies.

What makes this volume especially appropriate for undergraduate and graduate teaching is its critical focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance artists and choreographers – among these, Oskar Schlemmer, Merce Cunningham, Kazuo Ohno, William Forsythe, Bill T. Jones, and Pina Bausch, some of the most high-profile European, American, and Japanese artists of the past century. The volume’s constellation of topics delves into controversies that are essential turning points in the field (notably, Still/Here and Paris is Burning), which illuminate the spine of the field while interlinking dance scholarship with performance theory, film, visual, and public art.

The volume contains the first critical assessments of Franko’s contribution to the field by André Lepecki and Gay Morris, and an interview incorporating a biographical dimension to the development of Franko’s work and its relation to his dance and choreography. Ultimately, this Reader encourages a wide scope of conversation and engagement, opening up core questions in ethics, embodiment, and performativity.

Mark Franko is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University (Philadelphia). Founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series, Franko is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, writing a book on French neoclassical ballet.

Alessandra Nicifero is a dance writer and translator based in New York City. Her major interests focus on movement analysis, social choreography, the spatial organization of memories, and archiving dance material. Currently, she is studying at the New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.