Something you should know

For this new session of Something you should know, meet Mark Franko, an internationally renowned dance historian.

Mark Franko is an internationally renowned dance historian. He has renewed our understanding of Baroque dance as much as of twentieth-century performance and choreography, whose relations with the political field and the constitution of collectives he has studied in particular. Since Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics in 1995, he has published Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, translated into French by Éditions de l'Éclat as La danse comme texte: Idéologies du corps baroque; The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography: Kinetic Theatricality and Social Interaction (2022); The Work of Dance: Labour, Movement and Identity in the 1930s (2002); Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work(2012 )and, in 2020, The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: Interwar French Ballet and the German Occupation. He is also the co-editor of Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines (2000). In 2018, an anthology of his writings was published by Routledge: Choreographing Discourses: A Mark Franko Reader, which brings together the many articles he has published in Discourse, PMLA, The Drama Review, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Theatre Journal...

Mark Franko is Professor of Dance and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But Franko has also pursued a career as a dancer and choreographer, first (1964-1969) with New York's Studio for Dance, an early bastion of post-modern dance to which he dedicated a book, Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance. With his own company, NovAntiqua, founded in 1985, he has worked on the classical repertoire as well as the restitution of Bauhaus dances, for example. His choreographic work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Zellerbach Family Fund and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. NovAntiqua has appeared at the J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu), the Berlin Werkstatt Festival, the de la Torre Bueno Award Ceremony (Lincoln Center, New York), France's Toulon Art Museum, the Montpellier Opera, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the Princeton University Theater and Dance Series, the Haggerty Art Museum (Milwaukee), and ODC Theatre San Francisco.

Created in 2006, Something you should know aims to welcome contemporary art into an institution of higher education and research, by placing itself firmly on the side of the practice of today's artists and producers.

At a time when globalization is overturning the flows and polarities of the art world, giving rise to new forms of activism and new collective ambitions, questioning the space and forms of political representation or the constitution of new national references stemming from the communist world and decolonization, reinscribing utopia at the heart of collective projects, questioning majoritarian legitimacies and the blind spots of democracy : These are just some of the issues that the seminar aims to explore, by giving a voice to artists, curators, critics, heads of institutions and activists working outside France, who come to EHESS/FMSH to share their experience with us.

Seminar organizers

• Patricia Falguières, Centre Georg Simmel | EHESS-CNRS
• Elisabeth Lebovici, critic and curator
• Natasa Petresin-Bachelez | Cité Internationale des Arts