OpEdge is expanding into the performing and other arts by offering a new blog titled “OpEdgy Arts & Performance,” written by distinguished choreographer and dance scholar, Mark Franko. On an occasional basis, Mark will write on various aspects of the performing and other arts. Mark’s writing fits nicely into the OpEdge mentality: it’s provocative, precise and challenging.
You will always be able to find OpEdgy Arts & Performance through a link on the OpEdge homepage. We will also blast tweets and Facebook updates when a new blog entry appears.
In his first blog entry, Mark analyzes the recent production of Lully’s Atys at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City.
Now something about Mark: Mark is a Professor of Dance and Chair of the Theatre Arts Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has written several books, including The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930’s, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, and The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography. His articles on dance and performance have appeared in Discourse, PMLA, The Drama Review, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, and in numerous anthologies.
Mark is also a distinguished choreographer. His company, NovAntiqua, have been performing in the United States and abroad since 1985. Franko’s dancing background is diverse: he began his dance career with Paul Sanasardo Dance Company, later appeared in classical repertory, as well as in Oskar Schlemmer’s “Bauhaus Dances.” His choreography 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.
Mark’s a pretty impressive guy and we’re lucky to have him become part of the OpEdge family.