Dancing Plague

Dancing Plague is the term used to describe a social phenomenon that emerged in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, when in a sort of collective hysteria, groups of people danced non-stop in a trance-like state for weeks at a time, with participants collapsing from exhaustion and injury, and even dying from strokes and heart attacks.

This exhibition reappraises this episode of cultural contagion and virality, examining its social and gender context, its reappearance over the centuries, and its similarity to events that have occurred elsewhere. Starting from the slippery slope of history, through the movement of bodies, Dancing Plague explores imaginary links to recent cultural expressions of resistance and brings together witches, more-than-human creatures, and nightclub-goers in one circular dance.

The exhibition addresses themes such as queer theory and the death drive, dance as a means of creating identity and cultural resistance for less privileged bodies, the movement of essential organs and limbs transformed into language, as well as dance as an exploration and invention of the potential of our bodies, as a means of relating to other bodies and transforming ourselves and those around us, as an inter-lingual praxis that breaks down social boundaries and reveals a kind of awareness that has been oppressed by the symbolic order.

In Lito Kattou’s installation, the bodies of three mantises are arranged in a dialogue with sunrise and sunset, as part of a series of paintings in which the artist examines the circularity of time and its flow through the relationship of human and non-human agents to the environment and the astral phenomena of the sun.