The relation of dance to writing has often been linked to the phenomenon of dance notation as invented in the seventeenth century by Raoul Auger Feuillet and significantly developed in the early twentieth century by Rudolf Laban. It has also been viewed as an invention of aesthetic modernism with reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s idea of the dancer as an unwritten body writing.
To say that dance can be thought of either as an action that can be preserved in notation or as a metaphor for the act of writing itself in the absence of a writing instrument is nonetheless distinct from another idea to which Mark Franko (Temple University) will turn his attention in this talk: that writing itself can be constituted by movements. As elaborated in his recent book Text as Dance: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque, Franko proposes that a dance textuality emerged in the twentieth century’s study of the Baroque. He returns to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Louis Marin in this talk to develop this proposal.
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This event is co-sponsored by NYU Institute of French Studies.
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