Dance, Performance and Medicine
Thurs 19th May 2011
1-2pm
Venue: Bishop Otter Campus: Room LO6 (tbc)
Free admission
When I set out to start my research on ‘dance manias’, I thought I was looking at a transhistorical, transnational phenomenon: people banding together to dance, ecstatically, collectively, from India and ancient Greece to the raves of the 1990s. I eventually realised I was mistaken, and the ‘dance manias’ were a myth. What I discovered was that much of my literature was from medical sources, and most from the nineteenth century. This troubled me, until I realised that the real object of my research was nineteenth-century medical discourse, and the ‘invention’ of this epidemic disease. But what was the story I was to tell now? A philosophical one? A dance history? What if this wasn’t dance?