Mob Mentality & Rapture
A Transatlantic Dance Culture, 1518 – 2020
Jamie Brett | 19.01.2023
Movement strictly for the purpose of music (and the resulting dance culture it generates) can be tied through an inherent connection to human survival, self-expression and the communication of ideas bound by a folkloric mechanism. This mechanism is akin to a mirror, a tool for looking at dance which allows us to unpick a deep lineage of primordial rituals, religious ceremonies, subcultures, societal oppression and modern social history all passed down through controlled, collective bodily movement to sound.
During the lockdown of 2020, film director Jonathan Glazer worked with the renowned London-based arts organisation Artangel on a short 15-minute film. The team remotely recruited professional dancers from across the globe, inviting them to record themselves
dancing remotely until they collapsed from exhaustion. Entitled ‘Strasbourg 1518’, the film laboriously documents lone performers across the globe as they ‘dance until they drop’ (Crompton, 2020). Drawing comparisons between the insanity, despair and isolated repetition of the Dancing Plague of 1518 and the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘Strasbourg 1518’ evokes folkloric tension as we perhaps draw an uneasiness from viewing social-dancers in a sedentary world, a suspended state of migration where ritual can only be shared with a global, anonymised community.
Harking back to 16th century Strasbourg in Alsace, France, a different kind of pandemic swept Europe. Despite isolated earlier accounts of collective mania and fatally uncontrolled dancing events involving 200 people or less, mostly in Germany, the 1518 Strasbourg dancing plague had a cataclysmic impact that was felt across the European continent. Allegedly triggered by one lone woman, Frau Troffea, she began to dance in the town square much to the delight of peers and locals. Soon the mood shifted as Troffea appeared unable to stop her vivacious, unprovoked dancing even in the complete absence of music, food, daylight, or even social interaction. Within weeks, over 400 people were joining the ranks, dancing without rest, with the city council even erecting a stage and employing musicians to help the population ‘dance off the disease’. Reports from the time point to 15 people dying from exhaustion each day (BBC, 2016). This mediaeval state organised ‘rave’ proved to encourage the opposite effect, with many being led to religious sites such as statues of canonised saints or cathedral grounds. It was these ‘grounding’ state-initiated calls to Catholicism that allegedly stopped the spread of the disease both morally and figuratively.
Could the dancing plague present as a remarkably visible depiction of the virality of folkloric ritual, a petri-dish for the migration of rituals, or is it simply just mob mentality? According to Psychology Today, mob mentality requires a specific set of signifiers in order to be considered as such and these include loss of the individual identity, heightened emotion triggered by a group, lack of inhibitions and accountability due to group delirium (Wong, 2021).
On modern dance as a ‘primitive’ folkloric social activity, a 1957 British Pathé interview asks a local vicar what he thinks about a new form of dance being played out in his quiet local village; ‘Well of course, I’ve only seen it on the television, but my own feeling is, like a good deal of modern dancing, is that it is Pagan in origin and expression, and as one looks at the faces of those doing it, one cannot help but feel it’s having a bad spiritual and mental effect on them’ (BBC Archives, 2019). This new form of music, Skiffle, wreaked havoc on the minds of the 1950s older generation in Britain, despite its ‘old timey’ origins in American Folk music including bluegrass and jazz - genres that had been part of the very cultural fabric of the last four to five decades. Perhaps it’s this fear of migratory dances, sounds and rituals which strike fear into those so eager to brandish them as ‘pagan’ or ‘primitive’?
On migratory beliefs around dance and collective joy, in her book ‘Dancing in the Streets’, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich discusses the pandemic of ‘melancholy’ which began to be reported by physicians in England during the 17th century. With high profile cases of depression (including Oliver Cromwell), this dormant emotional distress was considered an English affliction until reports of this ‘morbid melancholy’ began to arise from Italy and rumours began to spread stating that it could have been brought back to England through travelling dignitaries. Even at the time, Italians assumed this to be a Spanish migratory disease that couldn’t possibly have first emerged on native soil. Ehrenreich goes on to argue that this rise of European melancholy, much like an antithesis to the dancing plague, began a centuries-long aversion from public fanfare, social dancing and expressions of joy in public (Ehrenreich, 2008).
In fact, what does make a dance ‘folk dance’? For example, what differs between a Morris dance and a Breakdance? Upon consulting the MOMFER folklore motif index, dancing in its own right appears peculiarly absent from the tales indexed by folklorist Stith Thompson. ‘D1508.2: Music restores reason.’ (MOMFER, 2019) seems closest to the argument of this essay. Music in most forms, provides an avenue for a social-dance culture in which migratory sounds, beliefs and rituals come together to provide reason, common understanding, and in turn – collective joy in a globally connected world.
Podcaster Martin Green comments on the profound connection between his youth, recalling waking up before dawn to walk up a long hill to Morris dance with his father in the 1980s, and his later experience of dawn through Acid House raves he attended on the same pastures in his late teens. In his podcast ‘Dancers at Dawn’ published by BBC Sounds, Green spends time alone revisiting the same hill whilst dancing to an Acid House DJ mix designed to be played during an outdoor rave during the slow rise of the sun. Now in his 50s, Green remarks in breathless ecstasy, ‘The sun does make you feel alive, you survived the night, it's fundamental, I’m not dead” (Green, 2021).
As the industrial revolution came to a climatic end in Britain during the premiership of prime minister Margaret Thatcher, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young people across the country experienced an existential void. What are we to make of our future, now the factories have closed? In almost symbiotic timing, a new sound was emerging concurrently in Europe and the USA, a sound fuelled by changes in technology and the speed in which technology can transmit through countries, continents and into other-worldly realms. Akin to a prophetic event, a new folkloric ritual took hold across the globe fuelled by newly invented synthesisers (namely the Roland 808 and 909), the German band Kraftwerk’s post-Bauhaus disciplined beats fused with Detroit’s young black men fuelled by Afrofuturist ideas. This folkloric ritual took people outside of their homes at night, into green fields and liminal spaces, whilst the emergence of new party drugs such as MDMA (or Ecstasy) led revellers to seek the dawn for the first time in centuries. Although this experience wasn’t necessarily new to the teenagers of the late 1980s.
King comments on the hippie culture of the 1960s; ‘To witness the dawn ceremony while on a strong dose of LSD must have been a powerful experience; watching a scratchy video of the ceremony decades later, the intensity of the occasion is unmistakable.’ (King, 2020).
This heady concoction paved the way for what is today, a multi million pound international industry – underground dance music. However, in the early 1990s, this mass cultural shift and ‘rewilding’ of the national psyche didn’t go unnoticed by government and press alike; ‘“During those years, rural Britain witnessed exceptional change and also a significant change in its use. Attempts were made at new methods of farming, of living from or simply existing on the land.” (King, 2020). In response to mass-housing repossession and economic downfalls, young people turned to nomadic ways of living; and in turn borderless attitudes towards the outside world.
In ‘Borderlands’, Kolioulis coins the phrase a ‘dub-diaspora’, an alternative world somewhat based in reality in which cities and countries are connected through an undying love of dub (Jamaican Soundsystem culture) driven Techno. They discuss the migratory origins of techno-dancing and in particular the impact of the Windrush generation on European club culture and music consumption;
‘[..] by the late 1950s there were already around 50 basement clubs in South London managed by West Indians. These venues—particularly the illegal blues dances—were of inestimable values as sites of cultural expression, social cohesion and autonomy for the Afro-Caribbean community, as well as for the preservation and dissemination of Jamaican music in the UK’ (Kolioulis, 2015).
Since the cultural and economic displacement of the late 1980s in both industrial Britain (particularly the North) and the American Rust Belt, the space-age, futuristic synthesiser led sounds of Techno emerged from the children of factory workers. Music videos would emerge from young Detroit-based producers such as Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson developing Kraftwerk inspired tracks with electro influences tied to Rhythm and Blues. These videos would often incorporate footage of robotic car manufacturing machinery, synced to the beat of melodic, space-age, UFO-like sounds. These somewhat artificial, probing clinical sounds were soon to grace the pastoral lands of Britain and the beaches of Ibiza, blasted from Jamaican-inspired Soundsystem’s which drove bass for miles into the night, de-Christianising the landscape, and bringing pagan dance rites back to the land in which they began. In ‘Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as translational countercultures in Ibiza and Goa’, D’Andrea comments ‘‘These shared characteristics are intensified by global processes, such as cultural rootlessness, hypermobility, and new network forms, which contribute to the development of a culture of trans-personalism on a global scale.’ (D’Andrea, 2009). A ‘founding father’, as they are often referred, of the Detroit techno scene is DJ Stingray. Stingray appears as an anonymous figure usually wearing a balaclava during his DJ sets and is still a major player on the international nightclub circuit. In 1989, Stingray formed a collective and record entitled ‘Drexciya’ in reference to the Afrofuturist legend which speaks of a thriving deep-sea aquatic civilisation formed from the 1.8 million Africans who died in the Atlantic between the 17th and 19th centuries, tragically including many pregnant women thrown overboard.
In the documentary ‘God said Give em Drum machines’, a Detroit DJ adds ‘Europe caught onto this like the Beatles caught on to the rest of the world […] Muslims go to Mecca, Techno lovers go to Detroit’.
In the paper ‘C’Mon to my House’, Sommer neatly described the black diasporic impact on the lexicon used to describe dance music. ‘Underground music’ is frequently used to describe grassroots, non-commercial, unsigned music played in small, DIY venues across the UK and beyond. ‘The name carries historical implications: The "underground railroad" was the secret path of escape for slaves seeking freedom.’ (Sommer, 2001)
‘‘Everybody in the Place, An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992’ which was showcased on BBC 4 to critical acclaim. Deller makes the case for Rave culture as a conduit in which to teach a potted, truthful history of British contemporary social history. Teaching an inner-London school of mostly ‘first generation’ A-Level Politics students, Deller brutally cuts through impenetrable boundaries of classism, racism, homophobia through the total subversion that made up the migratory folkloric journey of rave and dance music. So compelling is Deller’s case, that my own studies lead me to consider further research into a new form of folklore that certainly deserves its own classification - folk-rave culture.
‘The British countryside is an uncontrollable place which has never been tamed, despite the Victorians’ best efforts to Christianize their traditions which are based around order being inverted, so about danger and chaos. There’s a connection to the deep past in these events, and these parties also tapped into this pre—Christian chaotic world’. (Deller, 2018)
This is an abridged version of a full essay written by Jamie Brett for MA Folklore Studies at University of Hertfordshire & Museum of Youth Culture.