She embodies and shares the contagious and dissenting potential of the dancing body.

In a context of epidemics and famines, medieval Europe experienced irrepressible outbreaks of dancing: men and women would dance frantically in the streets for days, even weeks on end, without being able to stop. These “dancing manias” remain unexplained; disease or tool for healing? Uncontrollable trance or collective catharsis? At a time when the world has been faced with a pandemic that has changed our relationship with our own and other people's bodies, Mette Ingvartsen has drawn on historical context to problematise our current situation.

A person dancing freely, exposed to the eyes of all, is contagious: their energy is communicative, their abandon and frenzy attracts. This contagion through imitation led these dance outbreaks to be regarded suspiciously as a “sickness” without a precise cause. Behind this dangerous image of public disorder, however, were bodies dancing to relieve themselves of the stress of epidemics, natural disasters and poverty, bodies dancing dissent.

Mette Ingvartsen has created a manifesto for a return to movement, linking gesture to speech. Driven by frenetic movements, she travels through time, questioning the religious, medical or political discourses that have sought to rationalise these excesses. Moving from chanted word to song of revolt, her body becomes the seismograph of a troubled present, transmitting the urgency of a collective impulse.