Dance Plagues and Red Shoes

 

The Red Shoes by Kate Bush (1990s throwback)

Last month, I read an article by BBC News about a real life dance plague (aka choreomania) that inspired Hans Christian Anderson's classic The Red Shoes.

• Read the full article here: The people who 'danced themselves to death' by Rosalind Jana (12th May 2022). 

Here's a quote to whet your appetite or just help explain why it's relevant for today:

Ecstasy and anger

It was perhaps inevitable that the dancing plague regained popularity now. The last two years have yielded feverish interest in the many pandemics that have gone before us, from the Black Death to the Spanish Flu. We have looked to them not only for comparison, but also, seemingly, to reassure ourselves that all epidemics eventually end. Within that, something tenuously classed as a plague where the contagion isn't sickness, but movement was always going to be alluring. As Welch acknowledges, one of the things lost during lockdown was the communality of dancing: that exquisite feeling of being physically proximate to hundreds of other people, everyone carried by music that commands the muscles and turns a sea of strangers into fellow travellers bound by shared experience.

A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 by John Waller

In case you were wondering, a quick and dirty search of PubMed brought up a handful of articles on "choreomania OR dancing plague."

There are many interpretations of The Red Shoes out there.  [Just Google it, and you'll see!] To me, The Red Shoes was less about moralizing and punishment for the vanity of wanting a pair of pretty dance shoes, and more about getting swept up in something you can't control -- like addiction, or possession, or even just loosing your footing in a meaningful life.  If you don't have plans for your own life, someone else will and it may not be to your liking.   

If you are fascinated with this tangent of story as medicine, check out Clarisa Pinkola Estes' classic book, Women who Run with the Wolves.  The author is a Jungian analyst and cantadora [Keeper of the Stories] and includes a long chapter on The Red Shoes and a compelling interpretation.    It is one of my all-time favorite books. ;-)