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Mark Franko

Temple University, Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance, Faculty Member

University of California, Santa Cruz, Theater Arts, Emeritus

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Mark Franko is a choreographer and dance scholar. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. He formed the dance company NovAntiqua in 1984 and toured his choreography in the U.S. and Europe, performing most recently with Fábian Barba in Buenos Aires. He has been a Getty Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Fellow in the Humanities. He is founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory Book Series and currently Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance and Director of the Institute of Dance Scholarship at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University.
Address: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

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Videos by Mark Franko

“Le corps baroque: histoire et reconstitution du ballet de cour”, talk given in the series “De l’image à la scène: les arts baroques au XVIIe siècle” in the context of the festival “Le printemps du baroque”, curated by Marcella Lista, Louvre Museum, Paris (February 25, 2010).

Lecture given at the Louvre in the context of "Le Printemps du Baroque"

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Three ballets by Mark Franko: "Five Gestures for Dancer", "Harmony of the Spheres" and "Death of an Attitude" (Washington Square Methodist Church, New York City).

The solo "Five Gestures for Dancer" (Webern) is danced by Douglas Weiss. "Harmony of the Spheres... more

61 views

Book launch for "The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar" for Dancox with Susan Jones

A conversation/interview between Susan Jones and Mark Franko on Mark's new book about interwar Fr... more

30 views

Fabian Barba and Mark Franko, "Le Marbre Tremble". Performance on April 3rd 2014 at Conwell Theater, Temple University, Philadelphia.

"Le Marbre Tremble" was at its inception a collaboration between Mark Franko and photographer Ern... more "Le Marbre Tremble" was at its inception a collaboration between Mark Franko and photographer Ernestine Ruben. The dance uses Ruben’s large-scale photographic projections of the caryatids sculpted in the seventeenth-century by Pierre Puget. These two figures – Puget used galley slaves in the port of Marseille as models – one old and one young, were the pretext for the piece, which premiered at the Toulon Art Museum (France) in 1988 as part of a photography exhibit -- Le corps/la galère: noir et blanc (The body and suffering: black and white) -- curated by François Soulages. It was subsequently performed in New York City at the Washington Square Methodist Church on the program of Franko’s dance company NovAntiqua, and then in 1992 in Berlin by invitation of the Berlin Werkstaat Festival. As we take it up again today, Barba and Franko will mirror the two caryatids as they interact to rediscover the work about them.

167 views

"Characters of Dance" choreography by Mark Franko

"Characters of Dance" was performed at the Douglas Dunn Studio to a musical potpourri and feature... more

27 views

Papers by Mark Franko

SPANISH DANCE MODERNISM BETWEEN ETHNOGRAPHY, PERSONALITY, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: VIEWS OF LA ARGENTINA FROM ABROAD

Enclaves: Revista de Literatura, Música, y Artes Escenicos, 2025

This article compares critical receptions of the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé Luque, La Argentina... more This article compares critical receptions of the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé Luque, La Argentina, in France in 1928 and the United States in 1930. Expatriate Russian dance critic in Paris André Levinson praised La Argentina as an exemplar of Spanish classical dance and of Spanish national character. Expatriate scholar of Spanish literature in New York Federico de Onís extolled her dance as iconic of the Spanish national character but without arguing her classical vision. The comparison allows us to see the fragility of the idea of national identity itself as translated into movement and to understand it as the result of a critical reception that itself is displaced from national origins in a diasporic sense.

Dance as Originary Mimesis: Theory and Practice of the Passions in Action Ballet 1

by Mark Franko and Juan Ignacio Vallejos

Dance Research, 2025

This article argues for a reevaluation of Jean-Georges Noverre's ballet reform and the publicatio... more This article argues for a reevaluation of Jean-Georges Noverre's ballet reform and the publication of his Letters on dancing and ballet not as the originator of pantomime ballet but as a discursive event within dance history, one that prefigures dance modernity as dance that calls forth its own theory. It argues concurrently that pantomime ballet was not a transitional genre to Romantic ballet but an experimental genre whose main goal was not to tell a story. Instead, we argue for the importance of the passions on the Noverrian pantomime ballet stage and how emphasizing the presentation of the passions shifts attention away from the narrative as the primary goal of the form and toward the presentation of affect in gesture. In this context, the article connects Noverre's ideas to glotto-genetic theories of language to show that the passions on the ballet stage constitute an originary mimesis. Finally, we discuss the place of these ideas in eighteenth-century aesthetics and how Noverre resolves the tension one finds there between imitation and truth.

Dance, the De-materialization of Labor, and the Productivity of the Corporeal

Moving Bodies. Choreographies of Modernity, 2017

From the historical perspective, The Work of Dance: Movement, Labor, and Identity in the 1930s (2... more From the historical perspective, The Work of Dance: Movement, Labor, and Identity in the 1930s (2002) asked whether there had been an alternative modernism within North American modern dance during the so-called radical decade of the 1930s-an antimodernism or proletarian avant-garde-that had gone unrecognized or been submerged by subsequent events, notably by the House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunts of the early 1950s. The book shows there had been a politically radical modern

“The Feminist Unconscious of French Court Ballet”

Cahiers du dix-septième. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2025

Editors Sylvaine Guyot and Hélène Bilis invited me to write this short paper reflecting on person... more Editors Sylvaine Guyot and Hélène Bilis invited me to write this short paper reflecting on personal methodology:

To what extent do you define yourself as a feminist scholar of early modern
literature? How central are notions of feminism to your work? Is feminism a starting point for your approach or does it take a back seat to your study of women and gender questions in early modern history/literature/performing and visual art.

FRANKO Museo arte artefacto

Spanish translation of "Museum, Artifact, Act" by Idoia Murga-Castro

Hacia una teoría coreo-política de la articulación

Esferas, 2024

Abstract: This article discusses the political interpretation of dance from the perspective of th... more Abstract: This article discusses the political interpretation of dance from the perspective of the critical and theoretical category of articulation in the political theory of Lefort, Althusser, Laclau and Mouffe. It proposes the tropes of sovereignty, the individual, and the impersonal to work through the significance of articulation to a theory of the political in dance. As such it is an extension of Franko’s earlier arguments on the co-embededness of the politics and aesthetics of dance toward a theory of the conjunctural. This is not to render political content contingent and hence removed from form but it is to affirm temporalities at work in the way form is perceived to carry political content and ultimately to articulate that content effectively and persuasively. The apparent segregation of dance from the political is paradoxically the condition upon which this articulation is reliant.

Keywords: articulation, disarticulation, conjuncture, sovereignty, the bourgeois individual, the impersonal, politics, the political, Claude Lefort, Louis Althusser, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Stuart Hall, Randy Martin

Spring Ahead, Fall Back: New York City Ballet’s Tradition of the New

The Massachusetts Review, 2024

A season review of the New York City Ballet during winter/spring 2024 during the 75th anniversary... more

Border Crossings

Gagosian, 2024

An interview with Mark Franko, Gillian Jakab and Ninotchka Bennahum on Bennahums exhibition "Bord... more

NOTES ON GISELLE: ANGEL CORELLA'S PRODUCTION FOR THE PHILADELPHIA BALLET

The Massachusetts Review Performance blog, 2024

In this review I recall the performances of Erik Bruhn and Carla Fracci as well as the London Fes... more In this review I recall the performances of Erik Bruhn and Carla Fracci as well as the London Festival Ballet performances of "Giselle". Angel Corella’s new production of "Giselle" for The Philadelphia Ballet has evoked memories of previous performances of this work and a reflection on the remarkable structure of the ballet itself.

OF FOUNDATIONS AND EVOLUTIONS

The Massachusetts Review, 2024

A season review of the fall 2023 segment initiating the 75th anniversary season of the New York C... more

Relaying the Arts in Seventeenth-Century Italian Performance and Eighteenth-Century French Theory

TanzScripte, 2009

Editor's Note: Choreography, Aesthetics, and State Violence

Dance Research Journal, 2016

It is rare that a nonthemed issue of DRJ should contain a sustained reflection on one theme broad... more It is rare that a nonthemed issue of DRJ should contain a sustained reflection on one theme broadly conceived: the role played by choreography and gestural sequences in state violence; the consensus necessary to the maintenance of violent regimes as lodged within corporeal aesthetics; and, above all, the heritage of this violence-what has allowed it to germinate and take hold within cultural practice as gestural sequence. Ranging across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century from Germany to Argentina to Israel, these articles also offer in their ensemble something approaching a historical theory of that relation. In addition, with two articles on Germany and two on Argentina the unusual possibility of comparison arises, which is rare in scholarly journals. At the same time, contemporary Israel provides another interesting point of comparison with the earlier two sites.

Late Style in Balanchine

The Massachusetts Review, 2023

This is a hybrid review of the 2023 spring season of the New York City Ballet. The focus is on la... more This is a hybrid review of the 2023 spring season of the New York City Ballet. The focus is on late style in Balanchine's "Agon" and "Kammermusik #2" in relation to Edward Said's book "Of Late Style." There is also some commentary on Ratmansky's "Namouna" and other works.

Published on line June 9, 2023

Acting the Rehearsal

Theater, 2022

A discussion of Brigitte Jacques's production of "Elivre/Jouvet 40," a play based on transcriptio... more A discussion of Brigitte Jacques's production of "Elivre/Jouvet 40," a play based on transcriptions of Louis Jouvet's lessons with a young Jewish actress (Paula Dehelly) studying the role of Elvire in Molière's "Dom Juan" during the Occupation. The article deals with the pedagogy of the scene as staged as a rehearsal and its relationship to the double performance of the actress as both acting the rehearsal process and playing the scene.

Margaret's Living Legacy for Dance

Dance Research, 2022

A tribute to Margaret McGowan

The Balanchine Enigma: Repertory, Variation, and the Plotless Ballet

The Massachusetts Review, 2022

A review of George Balanchine's "Raymonda Variations" in the fall 2022 season of the New York Cit... more

Post-Pandemic Dance Fervor and the Dramatic Turn

The Massachusetts Review, 2022

A review of the Fall 2021 and Winter 2022 seasons of New York City Ballet

Editor's Note: What Is Dead and What Is Alive in Dance Phenomenology

Dance Research Journal, 2011

Editor's preface to a special issue of DRJ on dance and phenomenology..

La partition musicale et chorégraphique

by Mark Franko, Kate van Orden, and Bojana Cvejic

Perspectives, Multiples, 2019

A virtual debate organized by Kate van Orden and Mark Franko for Perspectives, with Bojana Cvejic... more

Danser l'identité nationale espagnole à Paris et à New York (1928-1930) : Antonia Mercé, La Argentina, entre néo-classicisme, modernisme et expression populaire

Perspectives: Danser, 2020

This article compares the critical reception of Spanish dancer La Argentina (Antonia Mercé) in Pa... more This article compares the critical reception of Spanish dancer La Argentina (Antonia Mercé) in Paris in 1928 and in New York City in 1930 in relation to the perception that her dance represented Spanish national identity. Differences in interpretation by André Levinson, the famous expatriate Russian dance critic and historian living in France, and Federico de Onís, the expatriate Spanish philosopher who began the department of Spanish literature at Columbia University in New York City, shed light on how the idea of the classical could be applied to La Argentina even as it was inflected by notions of modernism and folk dance. At the time Levinson was writing on La Argentina he was establishing a concept of ballet neoclassicism based on its historical technical principles. In so doing he developed a general aesthetic model of classicism in movement as a body dilating itself outward into space through multi-directional vectors. But he viewed Spanish dance as “oriental” by virtue of its concentric movements. This article analyzes the rhetorical strategies Levinson used to view the Spanish dancer as the other of the classical so defined while also claiming she achieved a classical expression of Spanish national identity by virtue of this very otherness. In contrast, Federico de Onís, although not habitually a dance writer, argued that La Argentina’s nationalism was highly personal to her and also fundamentally gestural. He thereby proposed a notion of Spanish dance nationalism based on individuality rather than on a theory of aesthetic form.