Chapter 6: Dance to the Death

The dance to the death is a common trope in classical ballet. Ballet has always been an important part of my life, and growing up, my favorite ballet was the romantic masterpiece, Giselle (first performed in Paris in 1841). I was enthralled with the story ballet’s music and technical difficulty, the serious acting skill required, and the intensely tragic tale that unfolds in an enchanting European countryside. The title character is a peasant girl who falls in love with a prince disguised as a villager; when she discovers his true identity, Giselle dances, devolves and crumples into insanity before elegantly stabbing herself with a sword. As a dead maiden betrayed, Giselle is then destined to join the Wilis—a legion of ethereal ghost fairies who entrance and dance with their heartbreakers until they, too, perish. In all its surreal drama, Gisellestrikes an exquisitely poignant note between horror and bliss.

Giselle. Top: Bolshoi Ballet ; Bottom Left: Natalya Osipova, photo by Devant; Bottom Right: Australia Ballet

As much as I treasure them, tragic story ballets were not exactly top-of-mind as I strived to learn about my new city, masked and at arm’s length, during Covid-19 confinement over this past year. So perhaps you can imagine my astonishment when, while researching past epidemics, I learned about the existence of such a thing as a dancing plague. And not only that, but Strasbourg itself was the epicenter of the best documented conflagration of the contagious condition, also known as choreomaniaor St. Vitus or St. John's disease, that compels its victims to dance for hours, days and even weeks on end—often to the point of death by exhaustion. Maybe Giselle and the Wilis were not as far-fetched as I’d thought! And compared to the Coronavirus, this dancing plague sounded to me like much more interesting times…

Choreomania was a recurring phenomenon in the Middle Ages, popping up every few generations in communities along the Rhine River (that is, among “Rein-isch” people like me!) before petering out in the early 16th century. Ironically, the reason we know as much as we do about this major bout of dancing plague is partly the same reason for the disease’s disappearance: the printing press. Inspired by an Alsatian wine press, Johannes Gutenberg had invented moveable type in Strasbourg around 1450. By the time choreomania sprang up in the city in 1518, printing was well established and widely used—providing a mechanism by which to document and communicate the strange events that transpired, as well as to raise the general level of scientific knowledge and inquiry.

On a hot July day in 1518, a woman called Frau Troffea stepped out of her modest Strasbourg home and began to dance in the cobblestone street to music no one else could hear. She danced and hopped and leapt around as a crowd gathered, and despite the embarrassed entreaties of her husband, a wild-eyed Frau Troffea danced on well into the night until she collapsed. At dawn, she resumed her dance and continued for days. Soon enough, others felt compelled to join her, and gradually myriad pockets of zombie dancers were writhing rhythmically all around town while simultaneously pleading for mercy from bemused onlookers and invisible saints.

According to meticulously documented meeting minutes, city leaders convened repeatedly and with increasing concern to address the bizarre situation. First, they tried following the advice of Strasbourg’s up-and-coming medical doctors, who reasoned that the victims suffered from overheated blood and needed to dance it out as vigorously as possible. The city constructed a special public stage and hired musicians and dancers to accompany and encourage the victims if their energy flagged. When this measure led to as many as a dozen deaths a day and a major uptick in new cases, the leaders did an about-face and turned to local quasi-religious superstition as a remedy. Surely God was fed up with Strasbourg’s hedonism, and appeasing the saints—especially the obscure St. Vitus—was the answer. The city council banned all public dancing and drumming, temporarily cracked down on prostitution and other vices that could be offensive to God, and paid to cart hundreds of victims out to a rustic shrine a day’s ride away in Saverne.

In historic retrospect, it is widely thought that choreomania was a collective hysteria, brought on by emotional and physical turmoil during a particularly turbulent period, against a backdrop of Rein-isch traditional stories that primed people for such a catharsis. Life in 1518 Strasbourg was hard, and social inequities were at a peak. Several years of bad harvests had brought sustained famine to the region, while the mysterious flesh-melting disease, Syphilis, raged on without reprieve. The church was raking in indulgences—payments people made to compensate for worldly sins (poverty being one notable sign that God was unhappy with them) and to ensure their entrance to heaven.

Such desperate contributions in turn helped support the increasingly glaring high-life of the clergy, who feasted in their monasteries and convents and reveled in the city’s bars and dancehalls. When harvests were slightly better, the church encouraged the poor to donate some of their grain to please God; when the food supply waned, the church sold the same grain back to the people at exorbitant prices and forwarded the profits to Rome to build the Vatican. Trying to weather these miserable injustices and reconcile the clash between their faith and realities, people leaned on superstition and tradition to let it all out.

The theory that cultural suggestion gave rise to the dancing plague as a reaction to societal cracking is upheld by the way the epidemic wound down. After two months of fervent and fearful hot summer dancing by hundreds of mostly poor Strasbourgeois, the treatment organized in Saverne leveraged people’s deep-seated beliefs in saints and rituals—the hair of the dog that bit them, if you will. Cart-loads of dancers were assembled at the St. Vitus shrine, blessed in an elaborate ceremony, and each bestowed with the superlative gift of red shoes. Red dye was expensive and reserved for royalty and the pope, but the city council and clergy apparently saw value in nipping this epidemic in the bud, and their gamble worked. Most dancers were remedied by the saintly pilgrimage and shoes, and by autumn the epidemic was over.

If they hoped to get back to the business of living high on the hog in Strasbourg, though, the city leaders and clergy may have been disappointed. Scarcely a year later, the Reformation took hold in Strasbourg. This turn away from the Roman Catholic church and saintly intervention, compounded by scientific discovery and documentation, served to shift common beliefs. Rather than expressing their misery and outrage through wild dancing, people drifted to more mundane outlets—like headaches, gastro-intestinal distress and depression—to the extent that it is difficult for us to imagine a dancing epidemic today.

While the actual history of the dancing plague has been largely forgotten, bits and pieces of it have survived in our culture, art and literature—testament to its abiding allure or perhaps an innately human stress response. For example, later in the 16th century, a similar affliction cropped up in Southern Italy, when a woman who took to compulsive dancing blamed a tarantula bite. The “tarantella” spread like wildfire, engendering a whole musical genre and festive dance tradition still practiced and cherished in Italy and beyond. In the mid-1800s, choreomania appeared again in Madagascar with similar symptoms and social circumstances. Around the same time back in Europe, Hans Christian Anderson published “The Red Shoes,” one of his typically maudlin tales of an orphan girl possessed by red shoes that force her to dance until she chops off her feet. A century later, that story inspired a film by the same name starring an obsessed ballerina in red point shoes, although here again the shoes are more associated with the affliction than its remedy. The dancing plague also figures in quite a few European paintings, though I had never really registered those before as factual and documentary.

Engraving after Brueghel the Elder painting of Dance Mania in the 1500s

These various cultural references and written accounts of choreomania make it clear that the epidemic was terrifying. And yet, viewed through the rarified lens of modern life and especially the isolating Covid-19 pandemic, the dancing plague sounds beguilingly romantic. Some of the buildings and squares that I get to inhabit today stood watch when the dancing plague raged here, 500 Julys ago. It is hot summer days now in Strasbourg, and the whole world feels topsy-turvy. What if we all broke into a purging dance and hit a collective re-set with a pair of red shoes?

The Red Shoes (British film, 1948)

Notes:

With gratitude for my impressively curious and multifaceted friend Leslie Simmons, who posted a Brueghel the Elder painting on Facebook making reference to the dancing plague—which led me down my exciting research path. Thanks for the lead, Leslie!

I drew extensively on the book by John Waller, The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness, published by Sourcebooks in 2009.

I also relied on numerous other written, video and museum sources for historic background; additional specific references can be furnished on request. One curious source also describes dromomania, a traveling obsession, which sounds familiar to me: link.

'St. Vitus' was used again centuries later to refer to a condition associated with rheumatic arthritis, although the diseases were unrelated and the symptoms only superficially similar.