In early Christianity dancing was a common part of ritual worship. However, the practice slowly declined and was officially outlawed in many European parishes during the middle ages. Thus, dancing was forced to retreat into the private sphere or reserved for secular/profane festivities. By the 14th century, dancing became associated with “bawdy, insalubrious, activities, steeped in sexual mischief”. This general trend of disdain for dance is illustrated in the Tale of Kölbigk. Christmas eve, 1021, Kolbigk, Saxony, eighteen men and women disrupted a Christmas service by joining hands and dancing despite the priest's entreaties to stop them. The priest inflicted a curse upon them as a punishment from God for their sacreligious behavior. They would be forced to sing and dance for a year without stopping. When the curse was finally lifted, the dancers were knee deep in the earth. After a year of dancing nonstop, they finally collapsed as if dead. They fell into a deep sleep for three days, four of them died, and the rest complained of tremors in their limbs for the rest of their lives. This legend was harkened back to as a warning. The dancers were insubordinate because they challenged the authorities' new placid mode of worship. Authorities dictate the “correct” mode of worship and dancing was no longer sanctioned as a way to connect with God. The act of dancing ebbs and flows in and out of favor within devotional and sacred practice.

Lack of control could lead to mass hysteria, as the Strausburg outbreak of 1518 exemplified. Still unexplained to this day, up to 400 victims took to the street with uncontrollable dancing. Authorities could not quell the dancer’s, physicians advised that the dancers should “dance it out”. So musicians were deployed and special dancing halls set up, when this did not seem to work, they took to more extreme measures. Those afflicted were to wear red shoes sprinkled with holy water and crosses painted on the tops and soles ( possible inspiration for Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Red Shoes) and ordered them to go dance at the Shrine of St Vitus. For months during the summer of 1518 bewitched “victims would start dancing and simply not stop. Except for brief periods of fitful sleep and modest nourishment, until complete exhaustion set it, or death”. The dancers were described as superhuman who involuntarily performed Bachannatic leaps and foamed at the mouth. They formed circles hand in hand “appeared to have lost all control over their senses”. Some of the dancers claimed they “neither saw nor heard” and were haunted by visions of “spirits whose names they shrieked out”. Some of them asserted that it felt as if “they had been immersed in a stream of blood”. Others claimed to have seen “the heavens open and the Saviour enthroned with the Virgin Mary”. They “fell to the ground senseless, panting and laboring for breath...and then suddenly springing up began their dance amidst strange contortions”. The veracity of these descriptions is doubtful, if not slight exaggeration, but the mystery of it all persists. This outbreak of choreomania and the tale of Kölbigk illustrate the power of dance. To create disorder with the body, is to create chaos in society. When the body is not being used in sanctioned ways of worship or conducting oneself as a productive member of society, the very fabric of that society is threatened. And so these corporeal transgressions must be punished, and the story must be remembered. 

Sources:

Gotman, Kelina. Choreomania; Dance and Disorder. Oxford University Press, 2018

Kinney, Troy. The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life. Project Gutenberg, 1914.

Blog post #2, June 2023- The Tale of Kölbigk- Dancing in medieval Europe

In 1682, Jesuit Father Menestrier of France wrote that “divine service was composed of psalms, hymns and canticles, because men sang and danced the praises of God…The place in which these acts of worship were offered to God was called the choir” He went on further to ask, “What could be more blessed than to imitate on earth the rhythm of angels?”. In Spain, Villancicos de Navidad and Seises are celebratory dances for Christmas time. The body and flesh are highly contested grounds, and dance and music has the power to excite the emotions in mysterious and sometimes uncontrollable ways. It comes down to control, and needing to have control over a populace, and therefore their bodies.