sarma

Marcel Lobet

item

Marcel Lobet (Braine-le-Comte 1907-1992) wrote numerous literary and journalistic books ranging from novels to essays on history, eastern poetry and literary masterworks (e.g. the well-known Classiques de l’an 2000). Before the Second World War, Lobet worked for the monthly Revue Belge for eight years, together with Pierre Goemaere. In 1937, he started writing for L’Indépendance belge, in 1944 for La Nation Belge and the Revue Générale Belge, and from 1950 up until 1969 he wrote for Le Soir. There, he started off as a film critic. But the first dance lessons of his daughter Myriam, who died prematurely at the age of fourteen, inspired him to write dance criticism. During the later part of his career at Le Soir, Lobet’s focus was on literary criticism. The Sarma anthology is the first to collect his fifteen years of writing on dance, which started in the early 1950s. In 1956, Lobet had already published his first monographic work on dance, and in the ensuing years he kept on pointing out the importance of Maurice Béjart’s innovating academic dance to the Brussels artistic community. From 1964 onwards, Lobet was a teacher at the Brussels school of journalism, and in 1970 he was elected member of the Académie royale de Langue et de Littérature françaises de Belgique. In 1979, he published a biography on the Béjart étoile dancer, Paolo Bertoluzzi.