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Choreomanias
Movements Through Our Body
The notion of collectivity carries a nostalgic charge,
in Marxism and its derived discourses especially,
such that only groups acting in concert are seen to
exert the power sufficient to change social arrange-
ments. This nostalgia is present to the extent that
collective action seems increasingly difficult or
outmoded, relegated to the status of the ‘primitive’.
Primitive participation in ritual is intensely sincere,
it is loaded with faith, so such participation could
hardly be mediated by intellectual detachment,
irony or physical distance. Primitive participations
are corporeal and, it would seem, fully ‘engaging’
of all the capacities of the body.
Conversely, modernity has seen the rise of indi-
viduation of bodies (which is how medicine treats
them), along with the ideological individuation of
the person. Ulrich Beck has argued that ‘the basic
figure of fully developed modernity is the single
person’ (Beck 1992: 122).1 The debate in modernist
studies about whether or not ‘primitivity’ can in fact
be ‘left behind’ like some historical residue is
pertinent here, as I argue that ‘collective madnesses’
enthusing or mobilizing collective bodies have
existed in the past. Because they enigmatically
escape the explanatory frameworks of ‘individual’
disciplines or modes of thought, I think that modes
of individuation (of thought and its practical appli-
cation to the treatment of illness) might have to be
revised towards a greater recognition of the multi-
plicities of factors that traverse our bodies. Only
theories of complexity and interdisciplinary appara-
tuses can hope to come to terms with this situation,
which has nothing to do with nostalgia for lost
Pe rf o rm a n c e R e s e a r c h 8 ( 4 ) , p p . 6 – 1 0 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 0 0 3
Stephen Muecke
community or community action, and everything to
do with the fact that when the search for causes in
individual bodies reaches practical and theoretical
limits, then we have to turn to the more biophilo-
sophical position which asserts that multiple life
forms circulate in and beyond individual bodies as
epidemics, and even less materially as codes and
forces on life-enhancing missions feeding and
starving each other in particular ecological environ-
ments. In many cases, even the dead are still part of
the equation for life.
The Madagascans, obsessed as they are with
death and their ancestors, become possessed – some
of them – by spirits of the dead (Sharp 1996). They
may come to them in dreams, or they may perma-
nently occupy individuals. In the northern parts of
the island, the possessed are most often older single
women, and they are possessed by spirits called
tromba, who are actually royal ancestors. The
possessed might dress up in the style and period of
the King or Queen inside them. This kind of pos-
session may or may not be quite unrelated to an
episode of choreomania, noticed in the late 19th
century and reported by James Sibree early in
Maurice Bloch’s book, Placing the Dead:
The Imanenjana, or Dancing Mania
In the month of February 1863, the Europeans resident at
Antananarivo (Tananarive), the capital of Madagascar,
began to hear rumours of a new disease, which it was
said had appeared in the west or south-west.The name
given to it by the natives was imanenjana, and the
dancers were called ramanenjana, which probably comes
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from a root signifying ‘to make tense’.The name did not continue running, until they fell down, almost or entirely
convey any idea of its nature, and the accounts given of it insensible.After being completely exhausted in this way,
were so vague as to mystify rather than enlighten.After a the patients were taken home, the morbid impulse appar-
time, however, it reached the capital, and in the month of ently, in many cases, destroyed . . . Many of them
march began to be common.At first, parties of two or professed to have intercourse with the departed, and
three were to be seen, accompanied by musicians and more particularly with the late queen.
other attendants, dancing in the public places; and in a (Bloch 1971: 21–4)
few weeks these had increased to hundreds, so that one
James Sibree, with the London Missionary Society,
could not go out-of-doors without meeting bands of these
had just arrived in the capital, so was an eye-
dancers. It spread rapidly, as by a sort of infection, even
witness. He writes well about this phenomenon,
Choreomanias

to the most remote villages in the central province of

but has he been talking to doctors? No doubt, since
Imerina . . .
the dancers are already referred to as ‘patients’, and
The public mind was in a state of excitement at that
there are technical terms like ‘praecordia’. The
time, on account of the remarkable political and social
other discourses intersecting here concern religion
changes introduced by the late king, Radama II.A pretty
and politics, revealing perhaps even more about the
strong anti-Christian, anti-European party had arisen, who
phenomenon than the medical discourses, but more
were opposed to progress and change.This strange
importantly, these (somewhat incompatible) causes
epidemic got into sympathy, especially in the capital, with
are multiplied, and the syntax, as in my title, betrays
this party, and the native Christians had no difficulty in
a desire to entertain the collective singular: ‘the
recognizing it as a demoniacal possession. . . .
pubic mind was in a state of excitement . . .’, he
The patients usually complained of a weight or pain in
says.
the praecordia, and great uneasiness, sometimes a
Bloch, the anthropologist, has things to add from
stiffness, about the nape of the neck. Others, in addition,
his discipline, weaving yet more threads into the
had pains in the back and the limbs, and in most cases
multiple causality: ‘What Sibree fails to make clear
there seems to have been an excited state of the circu-
is that the dancers apparently believed that they
lation, and occasionally even mild febrile symptoms . . .
were preparing for the return of the recently dead
they became restless and nervous, and if excited in any
traditionalist queen, Ranavalona’ (Bloch 1971: 24).
way, more especially if they happened to hear the sound
As noted above, Madagascan cultures are strongly
of music or singing, they got perfectly uncontrollable,
centred around cults of the dead, and the major
and, bursting away from all restraint, escaped from their
ceremony (famadihana) involves ritual reburial
pursuers and joined the music, when they danced,
where the power of the ancestor is made manifest.
sometimes for hours together, with amazing rapidity . . .
In the case of spirit possession by royalty, this
The eyes were wild, and the whole countenance assumed
dancing mania may well be thought of as a kind of
an indescribable abstracted expression, as if their
collective re-embodiment. And Bloch notes that (in
attention was completely taken off what was going on
addition to the crucial element of music which
around them.The dancing was regulated very much by the
makes the events social and planned rather than
music, which was always the quickest possible – it never
accidental), the movements are meaningful:
seemed to be quick enough. It often became more of a
leaping than a dancing.Thus they danced to the astonish- The dancers believed they were carrying [the Queen’s]
ment of all, as if possessed by some evil spirit, and with baggage from the coast to the capital and they mimed
almost superhuman endurance – exhausting the patience carrying heavy loads which they passed one to the other
of the musicians, who often relieved each other by turns in relay . . . it recalls the famous cargo cults and other
– then fell down suddenly, as if dead; or, as often millenarian cults which it has often been convincingly
happened, if the music was interrupted, they would argued are closely linked to violent foreign contact. In
suddenly rush off as if seized by some new impulse, and this case, however, the somewhat surprising element is
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the absence of any clear leaders of any kind, and perhaps infection. But at the same time he saw that it was

the closest parallel is therefore with the ghost dancers of
North America . . .The significant aspect of the movement
is the combination of the frenzied situation, reaffirmation
of the past, the focus on tombs and the dead and the total
rejection of western influences.
(Bloch 1971: 25)
The rejection of things western was manifested in
the dancers (or perhaps we could now call them,
anachronistically, demonstrators) knocking off
people’s hats and killing pigs, both western
imports. The dancers were not therefore self-
contained, they were interacting
strongly with bystanders, forcing
them to greet them, smashing
contents of houses, and encour-
aging them to join the
movement, which even a parade
of soldiers did, going into a
frenzy and attacking their
officers (Andrianjafy 1902: 60).
The anthropological comparison
with the ghost dances of North
America encourages us to think
of this as an anti-colonial protest,
but that particular global
•From time to time a ‘Tarantata’ leaves the chapel to put on a show
political framing was certainly
in the main street, imitating the ‘Taranta’
not available to the locals.
The local newspaper, the Moniteur universel,
reported on 7 juillet 1863 that the dancers
said that Ranavalo et Radama 1st emerged from their
tomb to declare their son unworthy of the crown. It was
said he had sold his country to the whites. His mother and
father were groaning under the weight of this monu-
mental crime.Their spirits were weeping and beseeching
all their old subjects to seek the help of sikidys (diviners)
so as to deflect the curses cast by on their unfortunate
successor.
(Andrianjafy 1902: 61)
The expatriate doctor Andrianjafy wrote a thesis
about this phenomenon in Montpellier in 1902,
remembering what he had observed as a boy, and
gave it a medical explanation: an origin in malarial
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literally orchestrated; musicians had to be there
playing fast music for the dancers to ‘cure’ them.
His prescription was not only treatment for
malaria, but also, as a second step, modernization of
the whole society, including an ‘uncompromising
rout of witches, diviners and others exploiting the
credulity of the people. Ancestral prejudices,
superstition and ignorance, which are jealously
maintained by these people, must be eliminated by
progress, civilisation and science’ (Andrianjafy
1902: 62). Then towards his conclusion his rhetoric
becomes more strident: ‘This is a battle for moral
hygiene on three fronts: political,
religious and social’ (Andrianjafy
1902: 63).
A little research discovers that
there is a fairly large body of
writing on the other dance manias
which have been known to history,
especially St Vitus’s dance and
Tarantism:
between the eleventh and seventeenth
centuries, manias swept across Europe
as tens of thousands of people partici-
pated in frenzied public orgies and wild
2
dances lasting for days and sometimes
weeks. It is little wonder why psychia-
trists and medical historians classify such episodes as
group mental disorder affecting those overwhelmed by
the stresses of the period. During outbreaks many immod-
estly tore off their clothing and pranced naked through
the streets. Some screamed and beckoned to be tossed
into the air; others danced furiously in what observers
described as strange, colorful attire.A few reportedly
laughed or weeped to the point of death. Women howled
and made obscene gestures while others squealed like
animals. Some rolled themselves in the dirt or relished
being struck on the soles of their feet.An Italian variant
was known as tarantism, as victims were believed to have
been bitten by the tarantula spider, for which the only
cure was thought to be frenetic dancing to certain music
which supposedly dissipated the ‘poison’ from their blood.
(Bartholemew 2000: 1)
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Commentaries, including the classic treatise of
Hecker (1888), are a queer combination of medical,
social and cultural discourses. While, as a physician,
Hecker is sensitive to the after-effects of the plague
on the early manifestations of dance mania in
Europe, with the correlative factors of starvation
among lower classes. He also notes that the concen-
tration of the dancing around the festival of St Jean
related it to earlier pagan rituals, so that the clergy
attempted to exorcise this clear influence of the devil,
Choreomanias
and to stop it spreading to the more respectable
classes of their congregations. Hecker, in his secular-
ism, can refer to the effects of ‘Oppression, insecurity
and the influence of a very rude priestcraft, as the
powerful causes’ of this phenomenon (1888: 169–70).
Hecker speaks freely of these manias as epidemics, of
the bacchanalian freedoms enjoyed by the partici-
pants, and of the ‘morbid sympathy’ which united
the people involved, drawing ever more into the
crowd behaviour. Clearly this phenomenon set the
stage for the analysis of hysteria, even though it was
not a particularly female phenomenon. So we note
that after the ‘mass’ effects settled down, the activity
could be regularized and localized to individual acts
in the heat of mid-summer:
It grew every year more rare, so that at the beginning of
the seventeenth century it was observed only occasionally
in its ancient form.Thus, in the year of 1623, G Horst saw
some women who annually performed a pilgrimage to St
Vitus’s chapel at Drefelhausen, near Weissenstein, in the
territory of Ulm, that they might wait for their dancing fit
there . . .They were not satisfied, however, with a dance of
three hours’ duration, but continued day and night in a state
of mental aberration, like persons in an ecstasy, until they
fell exhausted to the ground; and when they came to them-
selves again they felt relieved from a distressing uneasi-
ness and painful sensation of weight in their bodies, of
which they had complained for several weeks . . .After this
commotion they remained well for the whole year; and such
was their faith in the protecting power of the saint that one
of them has visited this shrine at Drefelhausen more than
twenty times, and another had already kept the saint’s day
for the thirty-second time at this sacred station.
(Hecker 1888: 129–30)
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In the Europe of the middle ages dancing was a
courtly practice not available as an ‘outlet’ for the
pleasure of the lower classes, so while bodily
movement in the dance manias tended more to the
berserk than the graceful, the almost obligatory
presence of music as stimulant and ‘cure’, is a
significant factor in the pre-history of mass enter-
tainment, which would no doubt repay further
research. Hecker is sensitive to such cultural factors
entering into the manifestations of dance manias as
cultures. He notes, for instance, that in Liège the
possessed assembling in multitudes, frequently poured
forth imprecations against [the priests] and menaced
their destruction.They intimidated the people also to such
a degree that there was an express ordinance issued that
no one should make any but square-toed shoes, because
there fanatics had manifested a morbid dislike to the
pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediately
after the ‘Great Mortality’ in 1350.They were still more
irritated at the sight of red colours . . .
(Hecker 1988: 108)
Ian Hacking, in his book Mad Travellers (1988),
looks at ‘transient mental illness’, in particular the
fugue syndrome appearing in France about the time
of the invention of the bicycle. The bicycle, an ideal
mode for individual escape, is to the fugue as music
is to choreomania: an exciting technical prosthesis.
All factors must be looked at for an understanding
of these phenomena, such that Hacking’s evocation
of the ‘ecological niche’ is useful in that it invites the
kind of complex analysis proper to ecological
studies. But he also finds major cultural tensions in
operation, saying that one of the vectors within
which mental illnesses find themselves is ‘cultural
polarity: the illness should be situated between two
•Maria di Nardo’s dance cycle, the ‘Tarantata’, starts from a reclining position
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elements of contemporary culture, one romantic
and virtuous, and the other vicious and tending to
crime’ (Hacking 1998: 81). For the middle ages,
such a cultural and social polarity finds its sanc-
tioned reversal in Rabelaisian ‘carnival’, for which
the dancing manias may well have been dangerous
precursors. In the case of Madagascar the cultural
polarity is the one set up by colonialism and the late
Queen’s rejection of it. The cult wants to bring her
back from the dead to fight the battle again, and
reject the foreigners. But it is too late, Madagascar
from this moment on will enter the colonial world.
Under conditions of immense social stress the
collective body reacts, especially if it has no lines of
escape or contact with effective power. If God can
be no help, because there is a struggle between, say,
Christianity and paganism, if there are no govern-
mental mechanisms in place to relieve suffering or
at least listen to its complaint, then the collective
body convulses and reacts in ways to confound all
meaning in a hyper-sensational combination and
‘wastage’ of corporeal forces, the magic of ritual,
and flamboyant ‘mass’ political expression.
Medicine rushes in to isolate the symptom and
individuate the ‘patients’, but this practice is only
partially effective and its discourse reveals itself as
lacking any real explanatory power.
Mass reactions of this kind convulsing ‘our’ body
are rare today because of modern methods of individ-
ualization and treatment, but even medicine knows of
the social, cultural and historical factors which go
into creating a ‘niche’ where a disease can propagate.
When an ‘epidemic’ fired up by a strange complex of
forces causes the whole social body to convulse and
react, we might have to think again, with Isabelle
Stengers, about the ‘way human beings construct
both their individual and collective identities’:
I will simply remind us that it is not impossible for our
descendants in the quite near future to find themselves in a
position where they are classified into ‘risk groups’ and
their relatives, under pain of social opprobrium, are con-
strained to submit them from an early age to procedures
which will bring about ‘at some stage’, responsibly, a
statistical probability which today appears still to come.
Insurance companies, employment procedures, techniques
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for procreation, right to health-care; all these things one
way or another, we know, are going to be redefined on the
basis of technical developments for which the sole vocation
at the beginning was for the relief of individual suffering.
Beyond the legal and regulatory problems, what is at stake
is the way in which humans hope, anticipate, fear and
imagine, the way in which they conceive but also construct,
their own identities. Because of course, our societies make
all this up just as much as so-called traditional societies.
The only difference, and it is a weighty one, is that they
refuse, on this point, to think about what they are doing.
(Stengers 2003: 34)
Thinking about the historical phenomenon of
choreomania is a way of thinking biophilosophically
about the ecological complexity of life forms and
the political struggles they engage in, which under-
scores the need for open experiment and analysis in
interdisciplinary fields.
NOTES
1. As quoted in Ian Buchanan (2003), ‘ “Reality TV”
and Everyday Life’, Cultural Studies Review (forthcoming).
2. Images from Ernesto de Martino, La Terra del
Rimorso, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961, pp. 384 and 390.
REFERENCES
Andrianjafy, Dr (1902) Le Ramanenjana à Madagascar,
Choréomanie d’Origine Palustre, Montpellier: Editions
du Nouveau Montpellier Médicale.
Bartholomew, Robert E. (2000) ‘Rethinking the Dancing
Mania’, Skeptical Inquirer (July/August). <http://
www.csicop.org/si/2000–07/dancing-mania.html>
Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New
Modernity, trans. M. Ritter. London: Sage.
Bloch, Maurice (1971) Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral
Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar, New
York: Seminar Press.
Hacking, Ian (1998) Mad Travellers; Reflections on the
Reality of Transient Mental Illness, Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia.
Hecker, J. F. C. (1888) The Black Death and the Dancing
Mania, trans. B. G. Babington, London: Cassell.
Sharp, Lesley A. (1996) The Possessed and the Dispossessed:
Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant
Town, San Francisco: University of California Press.
Stengers, Isabelle (1999 ) ‘Le Médecin et le Charlatan’,
in Médecins et Sorciers (with Tobie Nathan), Paris:
Institut d’Édition Sanofi-Synthélabo (Collection Les
empêcheurs de penser en rond). Translation by S.
Muecke in Cultural Studies Review 9:2 (2003).
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