Cue the sounds of hundreds of feet dancing. Frau Troffea may have started the Dance Epidemic of 1518, but it was the authorities who hired a band and made them dance in the public square.
Cue the sounds of military marching. Cybernetics and looping. The dancers are caught in between two sides of the same technology of fear: Saint Vitus as curse, and Saint Vitus as blessing. The echoing of the dancing feet recalls the sounds of war—fear is here to stay.
And that is exactly what happens. The data of the dancing brings about new technologies, new objects to consume, new measurements. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.
From the 2011 riots in London to the Arab Spring, I’ve heard a lot about the effects of crowds on human behaviour. Mass Psychogenic Illness is the official term (or rather, the term taken up within the standardisation of the medical system) and Mass Hysteria is the term used when relating to women. (Shortly after Frau Troffea’s little dance, they started burning witches at the stake.) But official dismissal aside, it is terms such as revolution, occupation, or [fill in your blank], that are used when it comes from the bottom up.
During the French Revolution, wax was used as crowd control. Busts of figures revered by the people—eerily similar to heads on stakes
—were placed in the public town square, and traffic was forced to flow around these obstacles. Somehow through the chaos it worked, and a new system was born. During the Dance Epidemic of 1518, however, it was the dancers themselves who were placed in the square. A hired band and all, their presence was meant to cure the populace. But in the end the town leaders were wrong, and it was not the band that was put on a pedestal, but the fear of Saint Vitus himself. The town leaders underestimated the fear that they induced for control: more and more dancers joined, and a new system was born from old.
Now consider the idea of a plague endemic to technology and society today. (After all, as I discussed earlier, it is in times of crisis that the hidden yet communicable symptoms of plague most readily emerge.) Error: public squares become filled with dancers, the Blue Screen of Death appears with its lines of code, feet echo loudly, cursors blink menacingly, and the familiar monuments of the interface disappear behind the symptoms of their own infrastructure. New systems are created, yet technology continues to loop. Social media become tools, flash mobs become standardisations, new terms become used to define, and the symptoms become hidden away yet again.
But don’t get me wrong, changes can and do occur. Cures can be made that are external to the symptoms, but the fact of the matter is that fear is here to stay. After the dancers were ‘cured,’ the fear of Saint Vitus was replaced by the fear of breaking moral laws, and one system looped into another; the tune of cybernetics cannot be broken:
The events of May 68 gave rise to a political reaction in all western societies…Capitalism was very quickly restructured, as if an army were being put on the march to war.
Frau Troffea may have been joined by an army of many limbs flailing in error, but the sounds of their marching only looped to produce useable data for the town leaders themselves:
With cybernetics, the production of singular subjectivities and the production of collective totalities work together like gears to replicate History in the form of a feigned movement of evolution.
As if an echo, the beats of military drums come to resemble the tapping of individual feet. Cue military cadence: My Girls A Pretty Girl. Frau Troffea this ones for you.
Voice 1:
Title: Formal Self Reference on the narrative
writing created during the Dance Epidemic of Strasbourg, Dated December 20-12. (twenty-twelve).
Voice 2: Title: Official Assessment on the medical dataproduced during the Dance Epidemic of Strasbourg, Dated 1947.
Voice 1: Introduction: The majority of the story comes from the connected mind mappings.
Voice 2: Voice 2: Introduction: The majority of the data comes from the writings of Paracelsus.
Voice 1: As they are in movement the facts are all deemed to be truth and this writing is the final conclusive analysis of all the looping.
Voice 2: As they are in writing the facts are all deemed to be truth and this report is the final conclusive analysis of all the data.
Voice 1: This formal report stands in place of all previous writings. It is official and held up technically.
Voice 2: This formal report stands in place of all previous accounts. It is official and held up lawfully.
Voice 1: Table of Contents.
Voice 2: Table of Contents.
Voice 1: Section 1:Official Trajectories
Voice 2: Section 1: Official Terminologies.
Voice 1: A. Chorea Lasciva. Coined by Paracelsus in 1518, its victims were often women, whose thoughts were never heard and whose dancing style was never recorded.
Voice 2: A. Chorea Lasciva. Coined by Paracelsus in 1518, its victims are named choreomanics, meaning those whose thoughts are lewd and without fear and respect.
Voice 1: B. Tarantism. Mass psychogenic illness. To be confused with the Tarantella theme of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest based on Carey Grant’s walking like a tarantula.
Voice 2: B. Tarantism. Mass psychogenic illness. Not to be confused with the Tarantella the folk style of dancing created in Italy in the 16th century with a fast upbeat tempo.
Voice 1: C. Plague. Death. Monument.
Voice 2: C. Plague. Cure. Monument.
Voice 1: Section 2: Concept.
Voice 2: Section 2: Context.
Voice 1: Strasbourg, 1518, a city of kubernesis and ships of fools. Printing Press used as technology of power and control.
Voice 2: Strasbourg, 1518, a city of riverways and abundant trade. Printing Press used to provide information to the public.
Voice 1: Section 3: Methodologies
Voice 2: Section 3: Methodology
Voice 1: A. All records are those of moral law not voices.
Voice 2: A. All records will be given equal weight.
Voice 1: B. They will then be coded and considered in capital.
Voice 2: B. They will then be coded and considered in detail.
Voice 1: C. After, analysed and cybernticized.
Voice 2: C. After, analysed and categorized.
Voice 1: D. Finally, Looping, Looping, Looping. //Repeat //
Voice 2: D. Finally, Looping, Looping, Looping. //Repeat//
The plague, despite the death, can be used as a ‘cure’ for society. Epidemically new technologies are born that endemically hide the system (symptoms) from which they harvest. So many people died during the Black Death that timekeeping was created in order to efficiently make the most of the people left to continue agricultural production—cue watches, town clocks, bells, and whistles. With the Dance Epidemic, however, the doctors became the technology themselves. As a media of the day, Paracelsus was the voice of the system of the cure: dictating its terms and its future, taking over from the local practices of peasant women as doctors, and speaking for the dancers themselves. With mass dancing in public, wax tablets became replaced by the mass media of the printing press. Posters went up with warning signs; stories of ships of fools were circulated. And perhaps it is the most symbolic of all that the first known image of a printing shop was combined with that of the dance of death.
Cure is the currency of capital, plague the symptoms of its circulation, and out of this movement one set of fears becomes another. Social media and flash mobs all feed into the loop. And so do Frau Troffea’s dancing feet, and so do yours. Come to your feet and take a stand, and yet your feet become the standardisation of the desires of capital. Just as wax tablets represent both sides of the fear (effigy and religion, cadaver and medicine), cue Brannock Devices
. The dancers’ feet are standardised for efficient selling. But what about those that have blisters from dancing without end, that are half way between this side and that, with the fear of deformity? What about our body, our trance, our individualism, our dancing styles?
The marching sides meet in the middle of the loop. Cue battle scene.
Voice 1: Section 4: Beginnings
Moral codes are run through the benefit of the invisible hand of cybernetics. Brannock devices/ must be used to ensure that these hands reach the feet in efficient ways.
Loop 1: Separate representations in order to bring death to the ideas that go beyond places of trade. Loop 2: Re-connect communication in order to establish a sense of life and build individualistic communities, not the people.
Loop 3:/To prevent further technophobia, as all the dancers illustrated an aversion to objects, tighten yet keep separate individual desires.
Appendix
Paracelsus may have officially named it one thing, but we have never heard from the dancers themselves. The printing press may have circulated stories and announcements, but we have no record of what kind of dancing was actually happening. There are loopholes to the system: codes break down and need to be built from scratch again, the virus corrupts the computer beyond repair, error happens, bodies are deformed, and cures do not work. And just as I admit that I may only be telling some symptoms of the story, and only perpetuating one side of the fear, can we ever really escape? What was Frau Troffea’s body trying to tell her? Did she transcend the system into a trance? Forget standardised shoes and ships of fools, what about Bundschuh movements and peasant revolts? What happens to the medical data we give and the standardisations that are produced? And what is a cure after all?
Again, I’d like to know what she really felt, and perhaps from there find the real ‘cure,’ as in eliminate not preserve. The y-chromosome from the Black Death is just one slight mutated remove from the one present in society today. Cue the next part of the story, and the tune changes from public dancing to ‘make the remaining dancers wear red shoes and dance around Saint Vitus’ shrine.’ It is, somehow for me, the tale of The Red Shoes at its best here, and the moral of the story is not about love or hate, one fear or the next, or even dancing. Rather, it is in the power of putting the shoes on your feet and wobbling beyond control. It is the in-between that matters.
All images rahel aima