Dance For Your Life

Why advertising has a bad case of choreomania

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On days one through six God was preoccupied with the creation of heaven and earth, so much so that his friends got tired of hearing about it. On the seventh, he settled into a Wassily Chair, clicked on his Akari Light Sculpture, and read Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer, strategist, and intelligent designer Zander Abranowicz.

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Buzzcut Reports

A comment on some subject of interest

Dance For Your Life

Why is everyone dancing in commercials? From Pepto Bismol to ZocDoc, Liberty Mutual to Liquid IV, brands are putting frenetic figures on our screens, and boy is it getting old. With notable exceptions (this ambitious Nike ad comes to mind) television advertising takes the conceptual path of least resistance, and dance makes the job easier by giving actors something to do while a brand embeds in our consciousness for a few precious moments. It’s the creative equivalent of that scene in 30 Rock where Jack Donaghy needs to hold two mugs while filming a segment because he doesn’t know what to do with his hands otherwise.

By the law of the focus group, the consumer is the director, suggesting these stale spectacles do, in fact, drive sales and build equity. While research on the tactic is scarce, a 2011 survey found that 69 percent of respondents preferred television ads with dance. Other studies struggle to articulate its allure, citing fuzzy concepts like “awe and transcendence, enjoyment, and emotional and sensual appeal.” This failure of language is unsurprising: imagine explaining dance to an alien. Like laughing, clapping, or kissing, it defies logic, being one of those social adhesives that seems to arise from a universal collective unconscious. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that dancing makes us feel good, and associating positive feelings with particular products is smart business. Or maybe, at this paranoid point in Western life, it points at something more complex — something which, if we squint and tilt out heads, recalls one of the strangest phenomena in human history.

Dance has played a role in advertising since at least the advent of television. In the past few years, Spike Jonze, for one, has put it to good use for both Kenzo and Apple. Lately, it would seem the explosion of viral TikTok dances has inspired brands to follow suit. But where it has penetrated advertising, something unsettling seems to have snuck onto the set. Maybe it’s the total incongruence between the mundane products being promoted and the absolute ecstasy expressed by the dancers on screen. Or maybe it’s the feeling that the dancers are motivated not by free will — the essence of dance as an art form — but by commercial incentive. Either way, their motions come across frantic, their facial expressions strained, like child beauty pageant contestants beaming onstage while a fearsome parent glares from the crowd. Replacing the individual agency of a dancer with something extrinsic, like sales targets, drains the life from their performance. For those subjected to viewing it, the result is cringeworthy the first time, and worse every time after.

The motif of “involuntary dance” has long coursed through our mythology and entertainment. On the TV Tropes digital archive, an entire page is devoted to cataloging hundreds of instances in fields ranging from anime to fairy tales to video games to theme parks. In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” for example, a young girl is condemned to dance as punishment for coveting her beautiful footwear. In Aladdin, the villainous Jafar forces the Sultan to dance using magic. Scandinavian folk stories are replete with involuntary dancing, from the Swedish legend of the Hårgadance to the enchanted “Elf-king’s tune” of Norwegian lore. Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute includes a scene in which Papageno’s bells compel Monostatos and his servants to dance, allowing Papageno and Pamina to escape. The “Dancer’s flute” in the video game Skyrim possesses a similar uncanny power. The convention even appears in no less than three Simpsons episodes.

In fiction, involuntary dance is employed to enchanting and humorous effect. The magic is lost when it enters reality. Over a thousand-year period spanning nearly the entire Middle Ages, Europe was swept up in an inversion of just that sort, at a scale never seen before or since. Experts are still debating what happened, and why.

For the peasants of the Holy Roman Empire, 1518 was a dark year in a dark age. A series of weak harvests caused by excessive rain had put the price of grain and other subsistence crops beyond the means of the masses. Starvation ensued, sending the flood-prone region between the Rhine and Moselle rivers into crisis. Even before famine, the peasants were in a state of despair, with leprosy and the dreaded plague again terrorizing Europe. Add to this a novel disease — later identified as syphilis — which emerged as temporary sores and rashes only to patiently eat away at the brain, nerves, eyes, and heart. 

This was the rotten stage setting when an anonymous woman started dancing, unaccompanied, in the streets of Strasbourg on July 14th of that year. She was joined within a few days by more than 30 men and women. Within a month, the crowd had swelled to four hundred. One dancer was a harmless curiosity. Four hundred dancing peasants were a public emergency — and an economic threat. Apparently unable to stop and immune to reason or rest, they continued for weeks, ceasing only when they fell to the ground unconscious. Some never recovered, though reports conflict as to whether the epidemic resulted in deaths. Eager to clear the streets — and, we can assume, get the poor back to work — the city council prescribed music as therapy, even hiring a band to play for the afflicted around the clock. When this only made matters worse, they banned music and drumming within city limits. Desperate, they turned to religious solutions, shepherding the dancers to the shrine of Saint Vitus near Saverne, about a day’s walk. Miraculously, the pilgrims returned completely cured. Saint Vitus was made the patron saint of this mysterious ailment, believed to be both its arbiter and reliever.

Though cases of choreomania, Greek for “dancing madness,” had appeared since the 7th century elsewhere in Europe, the Strasbourg affair was the largest and weirdest case ever recorded, and that’s saying something. In 1021, 18 people had danced, entranced, for an entire year outside a church in the German town of Kölbigk. In 1237, a party of children danced from Erfurt to Anstadt, a distance of 12 miles. In 1278, hundreds danced on a bridge over the River Meuse until it collapsed beneath them, killing an estimated 400. The first large-scale epidemic of dancing madness started in Aachen in 1373, spreading to England, Germany, and the Netherlands. Scattered cases popped up in the following centuries, including a monk at the cloister of St. Agnes in Schaffhausen who danced until he dropped dead and a gathering of dancing pilgrims in search of relief at the shrine of Eberhardsklausen. Meanwhile, a Mediterranean cousin of choreomania emerged in the Italian peninsula when an Apulian woman claiming to have been bit by a tarantula began dancing in her village piazza, attracting others in a wild, wine-fueled reverie. So-called “Tarantism” even hatched its own musical form and dance, the “tarantella,” performed by dancers who believed it to be the only cure for venomous spider bites. While scattered instances of Tarantism were observed as late as the 1950s in Italy, choreomania had vanished by the close of the 17th century.

Explanations for the phenomenon have evolved over the centuries from the supernatural (the dancers were being punished by an angry God), to the pseudoscientific (the dancers were suffering from “hot blood”), to the misogynist (the dancers were hysterical women), to the neurological (the dancers had disordered nervous systems), to the social (the dancers were joining to avoid ostracism), to the psychedelic (the dancers had ingested ergot-laced wheat), to the psychological (the dancers were seeking catharsis from an unbearable reality), to the cultural (the dancers were the last of ancient possession cults driven underground by the Roman Empire and Christianity). Today, it’s agreed that instability — social, religious, natural, medical, and political — were a factor. The 1373 outbreak, for example, was confined to areas along the Rhine River struck by the worst flood of the 14th century. Whatever its triggers, choreomania has all the features of social contagion, a notion that stirs even more questions relating to the power of psychology and culture over free will.

The dancing seen in modern advertising can be understood as a descendent of choreomania: a commercial projection of anxiety presenting itself not on the streets of Strasbourg, but on the screens of televisions, smartphones, and laptops everywhere. They had the plague. We have coronavirus, which has worsened an “epidemic of loneliness” that makes the close contact of group dance more desirable. The Strasbourg choreomaniacs faced hunger and financial collapse wrought by bad harvests. We face a recession, which renders brands' appeals less appealing. The peasants bore the brunt of religious, political, and social conflict. We’re witnessing our own social bonds buckle under the weight of inequality and extremism, a theme which weaves into advertising in reliably awkward ways. The Holy Roman Empire experienced catastrophic floods. We continue to despoil our environment, which causes simulated celebrations of consumerism to feel crass and even destructive. A final stressor comes to mind, one that feels exclusively modern: the rise of automation and artificial intelligence. These commercials seem to address humankind’s fear of obsolescence by asking, via dance: “But can a robot do…this?”

For comfort, communion, or catharsis, our species turns to expressive movement in heavy times. Who can blame us? When future historians look back at the early 21st century, they may observe the dance that’s taken root in our advertising through the same complex lens by which we view Medieval choreomania. So the next time you see actors gyrating in joy on behalf of a curated gift basket, Samsung Galaxy, or bottle of Coke, look past the plastic smiles and see us, dancing for our lives.

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Comfort Stories

A fictional scene for meditation

Coastal Study

The cackle of a gull, muffled through glass. The sound threads into your dream like a line out of the labyrinth leading to dawn. Your instinct is to resist and will yourself back within the maze, nuzzling your cheek deeper into your pillow. To no avail. Sleep comes slow and leaves fast. You open one eye to see gauzy light filtering through the coarse linen curtains. The house, the room, your companion, your cat, all in repose. You turn over and stare at the fan for a few moments as it stirs the air. You reach for your eyeglasses, folded on a book beside the bed, sit upright, and raise a glass to your lips. Water, never sweeter.

The contours of the night before come into focus: fragments of conversation in a room full of voices and music. Your words, the words of others, language as tangled as a briar patch. It is quiet now, save the gull’s distant call and the gentle breathing of your companion. It’s warm beneath the comforter. You slept soundly, the sheets barely disturbed. The cat rests in the indentation between the two of you, the respiring field of its fur only barely perceptible.

You wonder what a cat dreams. Some days when you find it perched by the window chirping restlessly at the gathering sea birds, or nestled into a fleece that fell from a hook, or stretched in ecstasy on a square of sunlight on the rug, you too wish you were a cat. Now it is Sunday, a day to live like a cat, all sensation and no obligation.

You extract yourself carefully so as not to rouse your bedmates. Your woolen slippers rest on the floor perpendicular to the low bed platform and you step into them. The floorboards creak faintly as you rise and lift your robe from the dresser. Stepping into the hall, you close the door behind you and pad down the steps to the dining room, where the rippled windows expose a forest of hemlock and eastern white pine marching toward a rocky coastline and slate sea, everything scarcely ruffled in the early breeze. The sky is a resolute plane of gray.

In the kitchen yesterday’s dishes are clean and dry by the sink. You rinse the kettle, fill it with tap water, place it on the stove, strike a match, and light the burner. From the cupboard you take a ceramic mug, a gold tin of green tea, and a strainer, measuring two spoons of the fragrant leaves, dropping them into the strainer, and setting the strainer in the mug. Each motion bears its own dramatic gravity on a very small stage.

While the water heats you go into the mudroom and out the front door, walking down the gravel path that leads to the driveway to fetch the newspaper, wrapped in a thin plastic sleeve. The air is bracing. You pull the robe tight and breathe in the crystal hour, feeling a chill electrify the exposed skin of your legs and neck. The laughter of the gulls now sounds tinny, unmuffled.

Back in the kitchen the cat, looking rumpled, is sitting upright on the edge of the old worn wooden table, blinking slowly. It yawns as you walk by over the concrete floor, worn into unexpected cloudy patterns like a wind-licked pond. The cat tilts its head when you give it a brief scratch behind the ear. The water begins to boil. You remove the kettle just before it whistles and extinguish the burner, letting the water cool for a few moments before pouring it slowly over the tea. It whispers and bubbles as it soaks. The excess water disappears down the drain, leaving a pillar of steam rising from the sink.

You unsheathe the newspaper, toss out the unappealing sections and coupons, and fan the rest out on the table. When you retrieve it at this hour, not long after it’s tossed from a rolling vehicle, it’s easier to lay the newspaper flat, its creases having not yet formed. Spreading your hand over the surface of the paper you can almost feel the last heat lingering from the printing press. The cat wobbles over and sits on the edge of the paper, sniffing the ink. You glance across the headlines for a few minutes, standing there in the kitchen, until the tea is good and steeped.

You carry the mug into the sunroom that looks out over the water and settle into a leather lounge chair. Out in the harbor, garnished now and again with whitecaps, a lobster boat motors by, bound for a pot somewhere. Farther out, partially obscured by fog, is a lonely islet ringed with rock. You sip the tea and watch the gulls clustering around the passing boat, looking bored and fragile, their light frames buffeted by the offshore wind. The sea hovers around fifty degrees, so cold as to feel almost solid, yet so full of life — gray seal and cod and kelp — beings so distant from the dry world of your home and bed and car as to be alien, their reality inconceivable.

You take the empty mug into the kitchen, rinse it, and place it among the other clean dishes. You take the cutting board and place it on the counter alongside the serrated knife with the worn handle. You remove the bread from the paper bag and cut a slice, setting it into the toaster. The toaster crackles to life, clicking tentatively as the temperature rises. When the bread begins turning golden you remove it and spread butter across, watching it soften. You linger in the kitchen crunching the bread. The cat winds around your slippered feet greedily. A few berries, a glass of water, the crumbs swept into the sink.

You return to the bedroom with measured steps, removing a faded crewneck sweatshirt, t-shirt, corduroy trousers worn at the knees, and wool socks from the dresser. With a thief’s discretion you retreat to the hall and downstairs, pulling on the garments: a half-measure of preparation to mark the next chapter of your morning, shedding the infantile simplicity of robes and bare skin.

You scoop the litter in the mudroom, tying off the plastic bag and placing it by the door. The cat watches with suspicion. The towels by the washer you place into the machine, pouring a bit of solution, closing the lid, and choosing a cycle. It starts with a chime and jet of rushing water. You hoist the recycling and trash from their metal bins and fasten both, letting them slump on the floor while you slip your woolen feet into rubber clogs retrieved from a tray on the floor. Carrying the bags around the side of the house to the structure where they’re held until Wednesday morning, you pause to watch a small yacht cruise through the harbor propelled by pregnant sails, parting the currents with its prow. Its crew, an older couple who live down the coast, are seated comfortably, encased in matching orange waterproof jackets and pants.

In the kitchen you wash your hands, rubbing the soap between your palms to work up a lather. You take a small glass vase from the shelf and fill it with water, walking to the sunroom and portioning the contents to the assembled plants — various fern, a spindly palm, ginny — meditating in the pale light. The cat is resting on the chair in a tight coil. You return the vase to the kitchen.

In the office you collect the scattered books from the desk and return them to their posts on the shelves, aligning each spine with its neighboring volumes. You return the pencils to the mug, and gather the papers in a shallow metal bin. The tartan blanket on the sofa gets folded and draped over one arm. You sweep away the errant ash and bark debris and dust outside the fireplace and consolidate the charred logs between the two andirons, cast to resemble dachshunds. The firewood box is bare so you step out the sliding doors with the canvas carrier and load it up from the stack outside, returning and replenishing your stock for the week ahead. Thinking you’re building a fire, the cat wanders in and takes its usual position on the sofa. You clap the dust and ash from your hands and rise.

Above, the floorboards creak at the cadence of human feet.

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Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Some fans believe James Bond preferred his martinis shaken since that preparation consolidates alcohol at the bottom of the cocktail, allowing him to stay more alert than his drinking partners