Strasbourg 1518: reliving a 16th century “dancing plague” in confinement | Culture
In the summer of 1518, in the French city of Strasbourg, a woman entered the street and started dancing non-stop for days. Within a week, dozens more had been overwhelmed by the same compulsion. Within a month, some of the hundreds of people who got caught up in that irresistible urge to dance started dancing to death.
In 2020, another lone dancer begins to move, standing in the corner of a darkened room. Others join her, each in their confined space in different countries of the world, locked in repetitive patterns of exhaustion, in movements that are both defiant and desperate. At times they break down, but rise to dance once more.
Strasbourg 1518 is a 10-minute film by Jonathan Glazer, best known for his feature films such as sexy beast, Birth and Under the skin, and for visionary videos for groups such as Radiohead. “What caught my attention were the people of Strasbourg 500 years ago dancing in despair,” he says, “and the connection between them and Pina Bausch saying, centuries later, ‘dance, dance or we are lost'”. All of this came to mind when Covid-19 swept the world.
For some time the director had been talking about creating a work with art curator Artangel, the organization behind a host of landmark art projects from Rachel Whiteread’s era lodge at Steve McQueen Year 3, on the creation of a work; When the feature film he was working on was postponed due to the pandemic, he and Artangel co-director Michael Morris discussed doing something inspired by Strasbourg’s history.
The result, created in a record 13 weeks from the first conversation to its broadcast by BBC Films, is a response to one moment, inspired by another. “The appeal of the story is that it rhymes with our own times,” says Morris. “Our own confinement, our own epidemic, our own confinement and the fear of catching something. There is a timeless quality to the film. We wanted the viewer to feel that the dance has been going on for centuries and continues after that the viewer has finished looking at it. There’s a continuum in time. It’s not exactly located in the present, or in the past. It’s ambiguous.
The “dancing plague” of Strasbourg is in itself an extraordinarily ambiguous and mysterious event. “In terms of weirdness and understanding the extremes the brain can take us to, this is one of the weirdest events I’ve ever heard of,” says John Waller, associate professor of history at Michigan. State University and author of A time to dance, a time to diea book on the subject.
Waller says the facts about the contagion, which swept through Strasbourg during July, are elusive. The chronicles suggest that “many people died”, and one report estimates 15 deaths per day. The most detailed accounts come from city council minutes, as town elders attempted to contain the dance. At first they consulted doctors who suggested the best course of action was to let the sick rid themselves of their “overheated blood” by dancing more. So they built a stage in the marketplace and provided musicians to cheer on the dancers. Eyewitnesses reported that “the frantic movements of the dancers gave the impression that people were trying to keep their legs and feet from burning, as if they were suspended over a fire”.
When the dancers continued to die, the bourgeois tried another strategy, confining them to their homes, while simultaneously trying to purge the city of sin – banishing prostitutes, gamblers and habitual drunkards. When even that didn’t work out, they arranged for the dancers to be tied to carts and taken to the shrine of Saint Vitus, the patron saint of dance. There they had their feet put in red shoes – a fact Hans Christian Andersen used when he wrote a story about a girl who was condemned to dance to death – and were blessed with oil saint and water before being taken to the sanctuary.
After that they seemed to recover and the outbreak died down. Waller believes the whole affair was a case of mass psychogenic illness, where people believed to have been cursed by Saint Vitus would fall into dissociative states, a kind of possession trance. They were sensitive to it because of the extreme distress in their lives and the oppressive and unstable social conditions. “This is a time when you have a series of terrible harvests and grain prices are at a generational high,” he says. “You are also afraid of the new disease of syphilis, as well as the plague, and what is called English sweat, which no one really knows what it was.
All this makes the history of Strasbourg a rich starting point for Glazer’s film. It’s no more ‘dance plague’ than it is the Covid-19 pandemic, but both provide a backdrop for something more allusive and haunting, propelled by an insistent and eerie score by the collaborator Glazer regular, Mica Levi.
As it should be, given its inspiration, the majority of the dancers come from Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which Morris and Glazer have visited together over the years. They are direct heirs to Bausch’s belief that it is not how dancers move, but what makes them move that matters. “Their training with Pina was that they just gave and gave,” says Morris. “You feel that in the film. Others, recruited with the help and advice of Sadler’s Wells, include Botis Seva, the British choreographer, and Germaine Acogny, the pioneering dancer from Senegal.
Meetings between employees were organized on Zoom. “All I really did was discuss the idea with them and then send them Mica’s music,” says Glazer. “And [said] if they liked the combination, to think about what they wanted to express, mainly from their bedroom. A few days later they showed us a trial and we went from there. He was shocked by the results. “I felt privileged to see what they produced. Each dance was like a monologue,” he says. Final filming took place via iPhones at three times of the day and night; then Glazer got to work in the editing suite.
For cinematographer Darius Khondji, it was “a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” “It was like creating a creature of dance and imagination,” he says. “When I look at it now, it’s a piece, a dancer. It was like a living sculpture that we were creating every day.