Choreomania and Affective Currents. Remarks on "The Dancing Public" by Mette Ingvartsen

Abstract

The history of choreomania recounts how a dancing crowd in the streets has consistently been viewed with suspicion. Estatic explosions of relentless dances, sudden spasmodic movements, bodily convulsions, and uncontainable gestures have recursively involved groups of people in public spaces, provoking religious condemnation, moral disapproval, political control maneuvers, and medical discourse-driven pathologization. Choreographer and researcher Mette Ingvartsen devotes a substantial period of investigation to this topic, leading to the performance The Dancing Public, a performance that invites the spectators to experience dancing together, to dwell within the sympathetic vibration collectively produced. The essay analyzes the writing of body and voice, conceived by Ingvartsen in the aftermath of forced confinement, biomedical controls of the anti-pandemic agenda of Covid-19, revealing a biopolitical unease rooted in the present that retro- actively engages with history through a choreography of affections.