In
Dance in Its Time, Walter Sorell names the
medieval dance phenomenon of prolonged, rhythmic
movement danceomania. People danced for hours on
end and sometimes for days, "What passed for
dancing among the peasants and artisans as well as
at feudal courts or in the houses of the rich was
a chain or ring dance that could last for hours…The
participants walked most of the time, interrupted
by a short run or by a few hops and leaps."14
Sometimes the dancing started in churchyards or cemeteries
where the dances took on a highly emotional charge,
"During the years of the plague such dancing
was particularly wild, often reaching the point of
hysterical gaiety, as if the people would have liked
to trick death or laugh its frightening sight away….
Others had hallucinatory visions or laughed hysterically
nonstop; laughter in a fit of melancholia or tears
could be seen in their enraptured faces and in their
gestures."15
Dancing in the Middle Ages served both as a release
of tension and frustration through movement and an
intensifier of emotions.
Sometimes,
ironically, the forms of Medieval dancing hurt those who sought
it as an escape from worry. Some dances popular during plague
years actually helped spread disease:
In an
oft sited game they played, someone would suddenly throw himself
or herself to the ground and act dead, while the others would
dance around in the manner of mock
mourning. If it was a man, he would be kissed back to life
by the women, whereupon a round dance followed. Then a woman
would act out the plague-infected person, falling dying
on the ground, and then be kissed back to life
by the male dancers.16
Sadly, the
dancers did not realize that in kissing their friends back to
life in the game they passed the plague from one to another.
Dances
that unknowingly spread the plague furthered the
notion of a Dance of Death or Danse Macabre. In contrast
to the Renaissance belief in dance as a sign of cosmic
harmony and order, the dancer Death brought tragedy
and divine punishment, "It was left to the Middle
ages to glorify Death as the messenger of God."17
The
frightening aspect of the dancers and the frenzied,
rhythmic nature of their dancing led to accusations
of licentiousness and debauchery. Moral censors charged
that "Some dancers formed groups, put flowers
in their hair, had sexual intercourse, and roamed
through the lands like the flagellants,"18
whom "reports found combining the whipping orgies
with orgies of sex."19
While these charges by the Church were probably exaggerated,
the dancing itself was seen as a threat to religious
and social stability; "since it was a burst
of running, skipping, and jumping, disharmonious,
it often reached riotous proportions at the threshold
of the churches."20
Medieval dancing's hysterical, emotional, trance-like
characteristics linked dancing with illicit passions
and escapism and opposed it to religious authority.
While Renaissance
court dance suppressed medieval dance's emotional and hypnotic
characteristics, country dances like the maypole dance or the
morris dance, which are still danced in England today, preserved
this dance tradition, and even in court, the anarchic, frenzied
movement of medieval danceomania surfaced in the antimasques
and on Shakespeare's stage. The satyr dance in The Winter's
Tale, the witches' carole or chant sung while walking or
dancing in a circle in Macbeth, and much of the dancing
in A Midsummer Night's Dream hearkens back to the wilder,
asymmetrical dancing of the Middle Ages. Similarly, the dance
most frequently referred to in Twelfth Night, the galliard,
required a vigorous athleticism unlike most court dances as
did the jig, the dance which followed almost every play in Shakespeare's
day.
