Death Dancing
The dance marathons of the 1920s and 1930s might have been extreme and a bit crazy, but they were actually pretty mild compared to the dance marathons of the Middle Ages. While the Roaring Twenties and Great Depressing era dance marathons were what we might call “dance ’til you drop” affairs, their Medieval predecessors were literal “dance ’til you die” events.
We all get a tune stuck in our heads sometimes, that we just can’t get rid of, humming it for hours or days on end. But what if it’s not just a tune that you can’t stop humming, but a dance that you just can’t quit? Just about everybody loves a good shimmy, but what happens if the shimmy is so good that you just can’t stop, and end up boogeying yourself to death? And worse: what if it’s not just you, but dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, gathered together in a literal dance to the death?
That happened often enough in the Middle Ages, particularly between the 14th and 17th centuries, that a term was coined for the phenomenon: Saint Vitus or Saint Johns Dance. The best known example occurred in Strasbourg, in what is now Alsace, France, in July of 1518. That was when the town was swept by a dance craze, and hundreds of people started dancing nonstop, for days on end. By the time the dance fever finally broke, many participants had literally danced themselves to death from heart attacks, strokes, or sheer exhaustion.
The madness started innocently enough, when a housewife started dancing in the street. Her neighbors clapped, laughed, and cheered her high spirits and joie de vivre as she danced. And danced. And danced some more. The woman kept dancing, without rest or respite, for 6 days. Within days, she was joined by dozens in her marathon dance, mostly women.
That alarmed the authorities, who consulted physicians. Their prognosis was that the dance craze was caused by “hot blood”, which the dancers had to get out of their system. And the best way to get it out of their system was to just let them keep on dancing. That sounded plausible, so the authorities hired musicians, erected a wooden stage, and created extra dancing space by opening up guildhalls and clearing out a marketplace to make more room. Those measures backfired, and simply ended up encouraging even more people to join the dance mania. Within a month, the marathon dancers’ numbers had ballooned into the hundreds, and at the height of the dance fever, 15 residents were dying each day from exhaustion and heart attacks.
The Strasbourg dance plague was not an isolated incident, and there were various other instances of mass dance crazes during the Medieval era. The Strasbourg outbreak was simply the best recorded incident, and thus the best known one. There is no consensus amongst historians as to the cause, so it is categorized as an unusual social phenomenon – a mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria whose cause remains a mystery to this day.