The Dancing Public

Movement of crowds on the streets in Europe was always deemed suspect, as the story about dance ‘crazes’ tells us. Yet ecstatic outbursts of relentless dancing, bodily jerks and convulsions, and uncontrollable gestures could spread and grow from one body to several hundreds pulsating in mass movement for days and months. As recurrent incidents over a long period from the medieval to modern times, the dancing manias attracted a host of explanations – from possession by evil spirits and curses of saints to neurological disturbances and the medical invention of hysteria. Contagion by imitation earned these outbreaks the suspicion of a dance ‘disease’ without a definite cause. Behind the dangerous image of public disorder lurked a body dancing to relieve itself from the stress of epidemics, natural disaster and poverty, a body dancing in dissent.

Evoking collective moments of dancing manias from the past, Mette Ingvartsen explores movement ecstasy within a social gathering in the aftermath of a pandemic. Her solo explodes the solitary confinement of 2020 with an intense mixture of unstoppable movements, incessant music and high-paced rhythms of words and chanting. A dance feast, a concert of spoken word poetry or a physical frenzy until exhaustion, this shape-shifting piece incites questions: Can a dance hijack and reshuffle the social corpus of the public? What is the need for excess and movement we might feel in our bodies today? Are we ready to be high on life again?

… The sky will be dancing
The moon will be dancing
The planets will be dancing
The stars will be dancing …