Strasbourg 1518

Strasbourg 1518 takes its inspiration from a mysterious dancing plague that gripped the city of Strasbourg during the sweltering summer of 1518—what began with a few people dancing rapidly escalated into a full-blown public phenomenon, with hundreds compelled to dance uncontrollably for three months. English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer collaborated with Artangel and Sadler’s Wells and produced this dance piece during the days of the COVID-19 lockdown. The 10-minute film featuring 9 different dancers is a manifestation of a total relinquishment of bodily control, reenacting the infamous and deadly dance mania in a 21^st-century background. Inside their unfurnished, minimalistic room, the dancers frantically move in jerky, mechanical motions that suggest an eerie state of possession. Choreographed to an overwhelmingly propulsive electronic score by Mica Levi, the film explores the fragility of a sane mind during lockdown—dancers repeatedly loping over a barrel of water and washing hands, periodically clashing their bodies against the wall, putting on and immediately removing a cardigan over and over—it metaphorically represents the pandemic experiences of restricted movement, mandated isolation, and the psychological toll of prolonged confinement. “How are you? From 10 to 1, 10 to 0?” (0:11–0:22), the film repeats the interrogating greetings throughout, directly confronting the people’s precarious state of being. The pure intensity of the dance movement and long shots demonstrate dreamlike confusion and disorientation in captivity, in a manic asylum that is called home. Isolation sounds quiet, but it is actually loud and hysterical; the dance brilliantly speaks to people’s feelings about lockdown. By referencing the 1518 plague, the film also mythologizes the experience of COVID-19 as a moment of historical recurrence. The film is an exhausting physical theatre, manifesting the unspoken—the absurdity, and the collective, psychological madness during the COVID-19 lockdown.