St. Vitus' dance

“ Vitus' dance in mediæval Europe.
O early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. ”

“ Vitus, where priests attempted to relieve them by religious ceremonies. The name St. Vitus's dance, still so common as a synonym for chorea, has come down to us because of the alleged wonderful doings of this saint in behalf of those affected during some of the dancing epidemics. Both Hecker and Madden51 give interesting details of the personal history of St. Vitus, who was a Sicilian, born in the time of Diocletian, and even in childhood is said to have worked great miracles, and was delivered from many sufferings and torments. ”

“ Dancing is simply marking time with the body, as an accompaniment to music, though the same—without the music—is done with only the head and forefinger in a New England meeting-house at psalm time. (The peculiar dance named in honor of St. Vitus is executed with or without music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the thought, the briefest relaxing of the mind, is fatal to the performance. ”

“ Vitus’s dance and tarantism intelligible, even to those who are sceptical respecting the existence of a morbid state of the mind and body of the kind described, because, in the present advanced state of civilisation among the nations of Europe, opportunities for its development no longer occur. The credibility of this energetic but by no means ambitious man is not liable to the slightest suspicion, for, owing to his want of education, he had no knowledge of the phenomena in question, and his work evinces throughout his attractive and unpretending impartiality. ”

“ Vitus’s dance and similar great nervous maladies. So late as the sixteenth century patients were seen armed with glittering swords which, during the attack, they brandished with wild gestures, as if they were going to engage in a fencing match. Even women scorned all female delicacy, and, adopting this impassioned demeanour, did the same; and this phenomenon, as well as the excitement which the tarantula dancers felt at the sight of anything with metallic lustre, was quite common up to the period when, in modern times, the disease disappeared. ”

“ Vitus in catalogues of saints, but never found his legend, though he figures as a day-mark in the oldest almanacs. He must be properly accredited, since he was an archpriest. And I pronounce and ordain, by right accruing from the trouble I have taken in this subject, that he, St. Vitus, who leads his votaries a never-ending and unmeaning dance, shall henceforth be held and taken to be the patron saint of the circle-squarer. His day is the 15th of June, which is also that of St. Modestus, [129] with whom the said circle-squarer often has nothing to do. ”

“ Vitus's dance – eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers. ”

“ Vitus's dance, or chorea, in the moderate form in which we now know it, is simply this, that there is a tendency to jerking movements of the body, these movements sometimes going on independently of all voluntary action, and sometimes accompanying any attempt at voluntary movement; so that the body of a person may be entirely at rest until he desires to execute some ordinary movement, such as lifting his hand to his head to feed himself, or getting up to walk ”

“ Vitus dance
At the end of the world I'll——"
The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called "such a curious, puzzled look," and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside. ”

“ Vitus's dance, these movements are more frequent in boys than in girls, for the over-mental strain of boys comes earlier; that of girls seldom occurs before the time of transition to womanhood, and its results are then different, though much graver. In cases of this kind, lessening the mental strain is almost always followed by a cessation of the movements; change of air, country amusements, and a generally tonic treatment perfect the cure, and dancing and gymnastics overcome the remains of any awkward habit. ”

“ Imposture grew more frequent, and wherever the disease still appeared in its genuine form, its chief cause, namely, a peculiar cast of melancholy, which formerly had been the temperament of thousands, was now possessed only occasionally by unfortunate individuals. It might, therefore, not unreasonably be maintained that the tarantism of modern times bears nearly the same relation to the original malady as the St. Vitus’s dance which still exists, and certainly has all along existed, bears, in certain cases, to the original dancing mania of the dancers of St. ”

“ And lastly, the Jesuit Menestrier, in the preface to his "Treatise on Ballets", published in 1682, says, that he had himself seen the canons of some churches take the singing boys by the hand on Easter day, and dance in the choir, singing hymns of rejoicing. What has been said in the article on "Calends," of the extravagant dances of the feast of fools, exhibits a part of the abuses which have caused dancing to be discontinued in the ceremonies of the mass, which, the greater their gravity, are the better calculated to impose on the simple. ”

“ Marcus Aurelius was accustomed to regard the art of life as like the dancer’s art, though that Imperial Stoic could not resist adding that in some respects it was more like the wrestler’s art. “I doubt not yet to make a figure in the great Dance of Life that shall amuse the spectators in the sky,” said, long after, Blake, in the same strenuous spirit. In our own time, Nietzsche, from first to last, showed himself possessed by the conception of the art of life as a dance, in which the dancer achieves the rhythmic freedom and harmony of his soul beneath the shadow of a hundred Damoclean swords. ”

“ All this explains how in ancient religion dancing came to be one of the chief acts of worship. Religious processions went with song and dance to the Egyptian temples, and Plato said that all dancing ought to be thus an act of religion. In fact, it was so to a great extent in Greece, as where the Cretan chorus, moving in measured pace, sang hymns to Apollo, and in Rome, where the Salian priests sang and danced, beating their shields, along the streets at the yearly festival of Mars. Modern civilization, in which sacred music flourishes more than ever, has mostly cast off the sacred dance. ”

“ And yet she is feminine in her dancing, but feminine in the simple, calm, womanly grandeur of the three fates of the Parthenon marbles. Hers is the essential and eternal type of womanhood, the type of the Madonna, of the peasant woman, breathing of the warm earth and the open air, of Ceres rather than of Circe. Her dance has perhaps the beauty of full summer rather than of spring. Its lines are flowing, but full of dignity and restraint. There is perhaps still a suggestion of the frieze in it. A new technique necessarily at first inclines towards rigidity. ”

“ It may be the ecstasy of worship or the ecstasy of grief. From the nature of the emotion out of which it springs the dance takes its character—voluptuous, solemn, bacchic, mournful, as the case may be. Whenever the passions of primitive peoples were deeply moved, they evolved a dance to express them. In the mystic ritual dance they found some expression for that divine unrest, when the winds in the great forests or the serenity of the multitudinous stars strangely stirred the heart to a sense of the nearness of the spiritual order ”

“ It is difficult to realise now to what an extent the whole life of the ancient world was coloured by the dance. It occupied as great a part as music, literature and the drama occupy in the life of to-day—perhaps a greater, for whereas in Western Europe there are many who care for none of these things, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, the dance touched the life of all classes and at every point. ”

“ Singing and dancing are inseparable. Vocal music is a sort of chant, adopted because of its nerve-exciting property, and also for the sake of enabling a mass of participants to utter the words in unison where intelligible words are used. A separation of caste between priesthood and laity is effected in very early times. The ritual becomes a form of magical incantation; the utterance of the wizard, prophet, or priest consists of phrases of mysterious meaning or incoherent ejaculations.
The prime feature in the earlier forms of worship is the dance. ”

“ It spells for us in its subtle rhythms the joys and the fashions of the season, when it attains the zenith of its popularity. Looking back across the years, one cannot fail to be struck by the changes which new dances have brought out in the music of every nation. Back in the days of powdered hair and gallantry were the stately Minuet and the Gavotte, to be superseded in later generations by the Waltz, the dance once considered so shocking and so beautiful. ”

“ Nobody could afford to give as many dances as the dancing cult required. Moreover, at private dances there were old-fashioned conventions and hampering politenesses to be observed. You might have to dance occasionally out of mere courtesy with some person who was three weeks behind the times, who could not do the Jimble or the Double-Jazz Glide, or might even have an attachment for the degrading and obsolete Waltz. ”

“ Long hair-pins, with clusters of wistaria and red camellia, are thrust across the top of the head, and fastened so that they stand out like horns over the forehead. In detail the costume is not pretty, but in its general effect it is singularly bright and picturesque. One may have as many sacred dancers and as long a dance as he will pay for, and as soon as the money is received the two priests get into their ceremonial white gowns and high black hats, and, sitting before the ancient drums, chant, pound, and blow on doleful pipes an accompaniment for the little dancers. ”

“ If it had not been for Spain, where dancing was introduced even into the churches, it might have taken centuries longer to revive the vanishing ideas of the ancient choreography and keep alive the plastic religion. We are told that a bishop of Valencia adopted certain sacred dances in the churches of Seville, Toledo and Valencia, which were performed before the altar. In Galicia a slow hymn-dance was performed by a tall priest, while carrying a gorgeously dressed boy on his shoulders, at the festival of Corpus Christi. ”

“ The truth may possibly be that that freedom from convention in which she glories is in reality a bondage. In her own words, “dancing is the spontaneous expression of the spiritual state.” The dance is “not an acquired but a spontaneous art, revealing the temperament of the dancer.” She is compelled to acknowledge the necessity for technique, but she fears that if it becomes excessive the art will no longer be able to stir the soul. ”

“ Nothing could be better done, in its own evil way, the object of the dance throughout being to express, in every gesture, the wildest fury of insolence and vicious passions possible to human creatures. So that you see, though, for the present, we find ourselves utterly incapable of a rapture of gladness or thanksgiving, the dance which is presented as characteristic of modern civilization is still rapturous enough—but it is with rapture of blasphemy. ”

“ A festive dance strikes a tuneful trip,—a menuet it surely is, with all the ancient festal charm, vibrant with tune and spring, though still we do not escape the source of the first pervading theme. Out of the midst of the dance sings slyly an enchanting phrase, much like a secret love-romance. Now to the light continuing dance is joined a strange companion,—the heroic melody in its earlier majestic pace. Is it the poet in serious meditation at the feast apart from the joyous abandon, or do we see him laurel-crowned, a centre of the festival, while the gay dancers flit about him in homage? ”

“ All folk-dancing, broadly speaking, is a natural form of æsthetic courtship. The male intends to win the female by his beauty, grace and vigor, or vice versa. From the point of view of sexual selection we can understand, on the one hand, the immense ardor with which every sensuous part of the human body has been brought into the play of the dance, and, on the other, the arguments of the pseudo-moralists to classify it with the frivolous and least tolerated arts.
The stamp of frivolity, put upon the dance by the Christian clergy, has retarded its natural development for several centuries. ”