Choros Mania: CLIMAX And The Cinema Of Kinetic Madness
Anya Stanley
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You really can lose yourself to dance.
Something odd happened in 1518. According to John Waller in his book A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, the madness began in the summer of that year when a woman named Mrs. Troffea walked onto a street in Strasbourg and began to dance. She didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, for days, “despite pleas from her husband to desist.” She swirled and gyrated before an ever-growing crowd, the air thick with “the smell of human sweat, mixed with the stench of bladders and perhaps bowels, involuntarily.” Soon others, mostly women, began to join in until around 400 feverish dancers filled the town’s public areas some three weeks later. Some died, many collapsed from exhaustion in the streets, all in the pursuit of one of life’s most simple pleasures.
The phenomenon has never been definitively explained, but it has been given a name: choros mania, also known as the dancing plague. It happened mostly in Europe during the Renaissance period, and entailed throngs of people dancing uncontrollably.
There have been many attempts to identify the origin of the mania, and one of the most popular theories is food poisoning; an ergot fungi that grows commonly on grains used to bake bread at the time is known to have psychoactive properties, including hallucination and convulsions. That’s right, some historians believe that these people were tripping balls and danced themselves into a frenzy. Others believe that it was simply stress, arguing the possibility of stress-induced illness turning everyone from law-abiding modest citizens into the writhing nuns of Ken Russell’s The Devils, filled with the holy ghosts of hedonism.
Choros mania has recently made its way into
With inhibitions loosened, convention goes sashaying out the window and freak flags begin to fly. Dancers whose interview tapes (shown at the film’s beginning) showed bright-eyed hopefuls full of life and ambition transformed into monstrous versions of the inner selves once the drugs took effect. A man who lovingly dotes upon his sister, also a dancer, later becomes filled with jealous rage when she is grinding on another man. Amid expressive blurs of krumping, voguing, and Fosse knee-tucks, raw energy and emotion sweats out of every corner of the screen. Noé’s watchful eye follows bodies in motion from dance to sex, sex to violence, violence to groveling, and the spectacle of it all
The same sort of mania can also be traced back through genre cinema. Just last year, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria followed a young dancer, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), as she began dancing for a world-renowned dance company that turned out to be run by a coven of witches. The film is filled to the brim with dance sequences that are more technically precise than the unbridled expressions of Climax, but the movements are nonetheless explosive with an all-consuming feminine force. In one now-notorious scene, Olga (Elena Fokina), a dancer who had recently quit the dance company, falls victim to this force as she finds herself bizarrely pulled to and fro around a ballroom to the rhythm of the dance being done by her replacement, several rooms away. Susie’s orgasmic breaths and Olga’s snapping bones provide the overarching soundtrack as Susie is compelled all the way through her routine, feeling a cosmic connection to some unseen presence. The dance in Guadagnino’s Suspiria is far more interconnected with witchcraft and darkness than in Dario Argento’s 1977 original; dance is, according the film’s choreographer Damien Jalet (in the Suspiria featurette The Secret Language of Dance), the secret language of the dance company, and thus the coven itself. So when an all-female dance team performs the sharply choreographed Volk and then later uncontrollably writhe and wail upon the floor during the film’s bloodbath of a climax, there is little difference to be seen between the two moments. The emotions, the energy, and the level of self-control remain the same.
1948 saw choros mania diluted down to the personal level with The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell (of Peeping Tom fame) and Emeric Pressburger. The film, largely a drama, takes a horrific turn as its star ballerina Vicki (Moira Shearer) sprints to her death, seemingly under the influence of her titular red shoes. Just before that turn, Vicki is in the throes of despair after losing the man she loves. Again, dance blurs the line between raw emotion, loss of control, and the handing over of oneself to a higher, sometimes darker, force.
Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror Black Swan (2010) utilizes dance as a transformative medium, one that carries its protagonist Nina (Natalie Portman) from ambition to madness as she slowly detaches from reality on the dance floor. Nina becomes the front runner for prima ballerina in the production of Swan Lake, and as she contends with her competition Lily (Mila Kunis), Nina begins to lose herself in her obsessive bid not just for the prima role, but for perfection itself. Ballet is a dance of exorbitance, which lends itself to film sequences like Black Swan‘s narrative peak in which its dancer hypnotically succumbs to her own inner struggles– and the stronger, more sinister side wins.
Noé insists that our more negative traits are the ones that crawl out when all charade falls away. Climax allows us to see the spectacle of that de-evolution to thudding beats and amid, as Waller put it, “the smell of human sweat.” Dance is a revelatory device in
A24’s Climax is now playing in theaters nationwide.
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