Strasbourg, 1518. A strange epidemic takes over the city streets, where inhabitants, led by Troffea, are unable to stop dancing. Between contagion and resonance*, the energy-object Tanzlinde, a dance mat created by Meris Angioletti according to the principles of radionics and inspired by the local Alsatian Tanzlinde tradition, will be activated during a 24-hour dance workshop. 

In order to build a temporary, variable community, workshop participants will contribute to the creation of a microsystem of energy conceived as an interplay between bodies and space, bodily perception and knowledge-transmission, listening and sharing: the propagation of an epidemic during the Winter Solstice!

Based on an energy reading of the dance mat conducted by a magnetic healer, a choreographic partition will be structured over 24 hours, while keeping attentive to participants’ bodily cycles (charge and discharge, rest, activity). Principles borrowed from Contact Improvisation Dance, implemented by Collettivo Mobile and the Dani-Ecki dance company, alternate with moments of free dancing. The space will be filled with an epidemic, an unconscious transmission of knowledge which circulates from one body to another, a collective experience of physical and mental, visible and invisible cross-contamination.

“During this time, people young and old started to dance day and night, so much so that in Strasbourg, carpenters and tanners’ stoves were made available and that people were hired to dance along with them.” —Léon Dacheux, “Chronique de Wenker,” in Fragments des anciennes chroniques d'Alsace, ed. Léon Dacheux (Strasbourg: Schultz, n. 3007, 1892), 148.

* Virginie Jacob Alby defines resonance “as vibration-making which leads two heterogeneous elements to be put into simultaneous motion (…) Resonance is the effect of that which is reflected within us. In this way, it is accompanied by echo and impact.” V. Jacob Alby, A. Boissière, “La résonance dans l’art,” Connaissances et Savoirs (2017): 69-70.