sway, spin, jump, die.
Or on how along with dance comes acceptance of death that helps us appreciate life.
Punks dancing in the 80s.
So I was going through some rough times last year. The kind of times where you have to learn how to walk again, just like a little kid, and find your way in the world. One step, then another, a couple steps back, but then again one step and another… Since proceeding this way can get pretty boring, I candidly decided that I better first learn how to jump and spin. I found myself in a rock club along with some good friends and some good music. While I was dancing, twitching on my trembling legs, stumbling and being raised up by the strength of the pulsating bodies around me, I felt pure joy for the first time in months. I’m talking about the feeling of complete communion with strangers around me, the feeling of losing my consciousness in the fog of other people’s consciousnesses all tangled together and hanging somewhere above us. I’m talking about the feeling despised by Rocquentin, character of Sartre’s Nausea. Roquentin is repulsed when the Autodidacte tells him about the authentic bliss that he felt while hiding, arm to arm and bound in solidarity, along other soldiers during a deadly war attack. Despite Rocquentin’s contempt, the Autodidacte states his love for humanity affirmed by his personal relationships and his affection towards all other kinds of togetherness. His love prevails even in the face of death. It might be overly dramatic to admit, but during that night dancing in the club, I vividly remember thinking : “It would be okay to die right now. I would have no regrets dying in this condition”. Thus, I can’t help but ask how come that along with utter joy occurs some sort of acceptance of death? While this might be too broad of a question, it is at least compelling to explore how ostensibly joyful movements of dance can bring ostensibly somber thoughts of death? What is exactly that thin line between dance and death?
We’re in Strasbourg, July 1518, and a woman called Frau Troffea starts dancing in public. Nothing can stop her exaltation. Only after six days of hectic dance she finally collapses and dies. Yet, while she was still alive, up to forty people joined her dance as if they got infected by it, as if the dance itself was contagious. Moreover, this group then grew to the outstanding number of (up to) five hundred erratically dancing people. These people plummeted in their madness for over a month without any real break, without stopping despite some of them collapsing due to strokes, heart failures and overall exhaustion. This event is known as the dancing plague of 1518 and it’s one of the best documented cases of choreomania. In a Johann Schilter chronicle, we find a fragment of a poem describing that “Many hundreds in Strassburg began/ To dance and hop, women and men,/ In the public market, in alleys and streets,/ Day and night; and many of them ate nothing/ Until at last the sickness left them”. As insane as the phenomenon might sound and despite it happening several times throughout history, its cause remains unknown. The most common hypothesis states that choreomania is an expression of mass hysteria occurring particularly in times of scarcity, famine and disease. Dancing would be a way to release one’s tension. Unfortunately it would then take over the person's body and mind - as if sinking into the movement was a temptation stronger than the will to continue fighting for everyday survival.
If we perceive the dancing plague as a tragic event, it must be because the victims seem to be will-deprived, they seem not to have any other choice than to continue dancing despite sweat dripping on their bleeding feet. We don’t perceive their dance as an utterly joyful expression of vitality, but as a medium that brings them death or even as an extension of death itself. But why necessarily focus on the deadly and not on the lively aspect of their experience? The Strasbourg people were indeed first very much alive. Their whole life potential, their whole vital force was expressed through their hectic dance moves. Therefore, the meaning of their dance can not be only reduced to the tragedy of their death. So, why not first talk about the possibility of the dancers reaching some higher form of being alive than any of us ever did?
Engraving by Hendrik Hondius depicting three women affected by the dancing plague.
In The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche exposes his concept of the dionysian which is often being confused for an aesthetic category exclusively applied to the creation and the interpretation of art. In fact, the dionysian is more of a vital force that springs from nature and that expresses itself in different kinds of domains and situations. What precisely can be qualified as dionysian? Any situation that involves entering complete communion with the world and, sometimes, with other people in it. The dionysian is about losing the feeling of one's individuality, the feeling of self, in order to gain another feeling. A feeling that precisely transcends and annihilates the self, at least temporarily. Therefore, Nietzsche finds the dionysian force for example in alcoholic and drug dazes, but also, if not primarily, in dancing trance. Dance is for him the pure expression of vitality, the moment in which one is the closest to transgressing the limits of his human condition. During a dance trance, one succeeds to elevate himself by getting the closest possible to resembling pure will or pure power. Furthermore, the members of a dancing trance find themselves joined in frenetic unity that mimics the metaphysical unity of the world. Unity, being the source of life and the form of life, becomes the dancers. Over all, the dancers transform on an ontological level. They become as close as possible to what unity and life are.
Let’s interpret Strasbourg's dancing plague through the Nietzschean theory of the dionysian. It appears that people’s dancing agony was simultaneously the climactic moment of their vitality, the highest surge of life that they have ever experienced. In dance they could have found the purest and highest form of the will to live that drove them through their lives. They could have grabbed onto it, apprehend it, and once satisfied simply let it go… or well, died of exhaustion. Either way, it seems like dance is what brought Strasbourgians no less vitality than agony. It might even seem like getting, through dance, to the climactic point of life has made them prepared to welcome death. Following Nietzsche's quote - “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” - it is tempting to tell those who are not convinced by my interpretation, that they are the ones who cannot hear the real music that the Strasbourg people were dancing to, thus are ignorant or narrow minded. The only problem in that strategy is that Nietzsche never wrote or said any such thing, though t-shirts from Amazon with it printed on them would like us to think otherwise. Therefore, it is okay to not accept, on an ontological level, the aspect of joy in dancing oneself to death, as long as we acknowledge the symbolic dimension of such a phenomenon. In this dimension, dance is a symbol of life that helps us to welcome death rather than make it distant.
What might be only of symbolic value now, had magical powers to some who came before us. For example, 1913th’s Rite of Spring, the (in)famous Igor Stravynski’s ballet, tells the story of an ancient slavic pagan rite involving the sacrifice of a young girl in order to guarantee the spring’s arrival. The chosen one would have to obey the strict tradition and dance herself to death in order to propitiate the god of spring and guarantee a successful harvest for her community. Neither the choice of a young girl nor the fact that she is dancing is arbitrary. Both of these elements, youth and energetic movements, symbolize life. Their hectic combination brings the vitality present in both to a climactic point. As if the coming of spring, equally symbolizing life, could only be traded for the most intense concentration of human vitality that exists.
Yet, the original choreographer of this ballet, Vaslav Nyjinsky, makes the decision of having the chosen one stand in the middle almost completely still while others dance around her. If, according to Nietzsche, dance is the expression of complete surpassement of the self, here the static passivity of the maiden can be interpreted as the protection of self, as a way to refuse getting lost in and for the community. There is something tragic in the maiden’s approach. She has the illusion of choice between two values that are absolutely impossible to reconcile - her own survival and the survival of her whole community - while in reality she will have to die either way by dancing on her own or by being forced to do so by others. And indeed, the last part of the ballet shows the maiden’s frenetic dance until complete collapse. In dance the young victim surpasses herself, she finally gives into the movement that becomes her last way of being. Her dance brings death, but at the same time it magically brings life. Life thriving in flowers struggling their way through the snow, in vibrant green leaves spreading out, in new cubs being born. The end result of the deadly dance is the preservation of life in its broader sense. It is crucial to understand that spring/life doesn’t simply come as the sequel of death, but is resulting out of the dance. It is indeed the dance that drains the vitality out of the girl in order to pour it into the world through the spring god's intermediation.
Joffrey Ballet staging of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"
However, that isn’t the only possible apprehension of the eerie ritual. Katarzyna Kozyra’s artistic reinterpretation of The Rite of Spring (2000) somehow reverses the meaning of the dance. Kozyra’s video installation is composed of seven big screens on which we can see people dancing to Stravynski’s original music. Yet, this time we don’t see trained ballet dancers in colorful Slavic costumes, but elderly naked people with swapped genitalia (men wear vagina prosthesis, while women wear penis prosthesis). Of course, Kozyra was fully aware that the elderly bodies wouldn’t be able to perform the demanding ballet moves and high jumps. Thus, she intentionally opted for taking hundreds of pictures of the bodies set in different positions (modeled on young dancers' pre-recorded performance) instead of asking elderly people to dance unwieldy. That technique resulted in a time-lapse video that shows an unexpectedly buoyant dance of elderly people that can now move as if gravity never had any impact on their bodies. This way, we see bodies that are notoriously marginalized due to being considered as not working well enough, not going fast enough, not conforming to the contemporary western lifestyle, at the peak of their vitality. It is clear to me that it is the dance that gives back to those bodies, too often perceived as hanging on the verge of agony, their youth. Dance yet again becomes in reality not the bearer of death but the proclamation of life. It widens our perception of what life is by forcing us to see its flow even in the physically weakest members of society. Nevertheless, simultaneously we have to remember that the elderly aren’t actually dancing, that they are in reality indeed getting closer and closer to death. Their time-lapse dance can therefore also be interpreted as a way of accepting that they will never again dance completely freely out of their own strength. This double apprehension of Kozyra’s work brings the synthesizing thought that while the necessity of making a time-lapse dance instead of filming a real one is a way of reaffirming and accepting one’s path towards death, it does at the same time show their love of life and the vitality still present in them. According to my interpretation, Kozyra’s artwork gives The Rite of Spring an unsettling yet overall positive dimension. Dance being ultimately correlated more with life and an acceptance of death, rather than its refusal.
Katarzyna Kozyra, "The Rite oF Spring" (The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2001)
There definitely are plenty of other historical, social and cultural phenomenons that associate death and dance, and at no point I strived to ignore their relevance. I can only begin listing some of them : the danse macabre motive in the Middle Ages, all kinds of indigenous rituals, the mexican Día de Muertos, New Orleans’ dancing funerals... I consider that most of these phenomenons, exactly as the ones described above, aim to honor life. Or at least they can be interpreted as honoring life, through the acceptance of death reached while dancing. In other words, if while dancing pops up a thought of deliberately wanting to welcome death, it is not necessarily a murky sign of distress. The idea of death can come to us precisely because dance brings the feeling of being alive to its climax : the two extremities of life and of death interconnect in the intensity of our sways and spins. The parquet, maybe not the ballroom one, but definitely the rock music club one, is an environment that favours launching our vitality to a whole other level. That might bring us to wonder about what is even further than this level of vitality… which might simply be death. And of course, while feeling so good with friends, with music, while being completely immersed in the moment, the thought of death seems less scary. However, rare are the cases where directly after leaving the parquet we find a way of committing suicide. The acknowledgement of death is mostly figurative - in a way it only amplifies the feeling of being alive. The consciousness of death and its temporary acceptance makes us appreciate life to the fullest, makes us honor the moment we’re currently in. This process might be even perceived as a self-accelerating cycle: the extreme deployment of one’s vitality through dance can lead their thoughts to the subject of the verge of life, and the further acceptance of death leads to a fuller appreciation of life for what form it takes in the moment. Either way, like I wrote, after these phases of dancing bliss we indeed don’t just let ourselves die. I, for what it’s worth, go back home, make myself some salted butter noodles and collapse into my bed, finding in both new pleasures of staying alive.
Rozalia Kowalska
