Michael Lawrence Franz, Ph.D.
Michael Lawrence Franz holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from Florida State University and an M.A. in Theatre from Villanova University. He has previously taught at the University of Central Florida and Florida State University. Mike’s primary research focuses on the topic of sport and/as performance, specializing in basketball and American football. His secondary research is in seventeenth century French theatre, particularly the history and works of actor/playwright Molière. Mike has presented his work at the Mid-America Theatre Conference, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Sport and Literature Association, and the Doctoral Theatre Students Association at City University New York. He continues theatre-making through the Playwriting Symposium with the Mid-America Theatre Conference as an actor and director.
Research Interests
My research intersects with the disciplines of theatre Studies, performance studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies in order to facilitate inquiries into the topic of Sport and/as Performance. I argue that the ways in which performance studies examines and interrogates the elevated and the every day can also be applied to sport as a means of uncovering new ways to rethink performance studies and how it can analyze individual figures, events, and other phenomena.
I am profoundly interested in the performance of surrogation in basketball by three key figures: Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Kobe Bryant. Joseph Roach defines surrogation in his 1996 book Cities of the Dead ~ Circum Atlantic Performance, saying, “In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric.” In the National Basketball Association (NBA), current players’ performances encompass various aspects of past players’ performances, both kinesthetically and culturally. In much the same way that Roach theorizes about performance’s reliance on surrogation, I posit that basketball’s reliance on the performance of surrogation puts the sport in a unique position for critical analysis.
Basketball’s performances of surrogation encompass aspects of on court play like movements, moments, events, and attitudes with either direct or indirect citation to past players. But I argue that performances of surrogation are also made up of larger off-court movements, moments, events, and attitudes. It is in this realm that the underpinnings of critical race theory, cultural studies, and performance studies come into play. Sport has always been either consciously or subconsciously engaged in various phenomena outside of its own borders, particularly politics, race, and gender. My work endeavors to keep these foundational aspects of sport history while writing about contemporary basketball practice. I prioritize studying figures like Jordan, Bryant, and James because of how their engagement (or active disengagement) with issues of race affects both U.S. and global culture.
By writing about surrogation in basketball, I hope to expand the conversation to broader aspects of sport and performance. I am deeply interested in the ways that, both kinesthetically and theoretically, we can pass down our knowledge to future generations. And this subspecialty of performance studies, sport and/as performance, draws from a rich archive of sporting events, figures, and other phenomena to argue for the ways in which performance inherently functions through sport. My work aims to further this conversation, to analyze how performances of surrogation in basketball creates a unique lineage for passing down physical and cultural practices.
My research in sport and/as performance also examines what I call “moments of negated possibility”, a derivation of the term “moments of romantic possibility” from Michael Oriard’s Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle and its intersection with Daniel Sack’s definition of the term “potentiality” from his book After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and The Futures of Performance. I argue that moments of negated possibility can actually lead to moments of realized potentiality. I analyze the case study of New Orleans’ 2019 Boycott Bowl, a fan-created event. The Boycott Bowl was a reaction against the outcome of the 2019 National Football Conference (NFC) Championship game in which the New Orleans Saints’ lost to the Los Angeles Rams on as an egregious error on the part of the game’s officials. as the result of a no-call by the game’s referees on what they perceived to be an obvious penalty foul. The Boycott Bowl generated profits for a civic good, the New Orleans City Commission, and I argue that its performance operates as a moment of potentiality that emerges from a moment of negated possibility.