The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (review)

Dancing with death has continually captured the choreographic imaginary. As morbidly parodic as prancing skeletons may seem, post-medieval dance appropriates the medieval macabre to serve specific aesthetical, cultural, and political agendas. The Willis of Giselle (1841), by hybridizing choreomania (dance mania) and the danse macabre, heighten the dark side of Romanticism. Mary Wigman’s Totentanz (1917) employs spirit possession and the occult to underscore the inner struggle between death and the dying. Marcia Siegel has demonstrated how Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table (1932) drew inspiration from the Totentanz cycle at Lübeck (1989,15–21). Kate Elswit has examined the choreographic experiments of Weimar Berlin in which the medieval motif served as a starting point for an eventual erosion of allegory (2009, 78–80). Realigning the theme with a Symbolist aesthetic, Roland Petit’s Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (1946) recasts death as a femme fatale. José Limón created Danza de la Muerte (1937) in response to the Spanish Civil War. Likewise, Christopher Bruce’s Ghost Dances (1981) resituates the macabre to express the oppression of modern Chileans under a corrupt government. Exploring the dynamics of opposition, Agnes de Mille returned to the rei-fied duality between life and death in The Other (1992). David Parsons (Ring Around the Rosie, 1993), Bill T. Jones (Still/Here, 1997), and Matthew Hart (Dances with Death, 1998) reimagined the plague-inspired Dance of Death as a lament for AIDS victims. And most recently, Amy Seiwert (Requiem, 2011) has colored the macabre movement with psychoanalytic theory. Although numerous post-medieval representations of the Dance of Death have multiplied, reconfigured, and complicated its significance, the same cannot be said for studies pertaining to the origins of this spectacle—until recently.

Much of the past scholarship on the medieval Dance of Death ultimately reduces the dance’s signification to one ontological distillation: death conquers all. Earlier scholarly output, mainly in the form of textual and iconographic compendia, is analytically disconnected from the religious and social change of the late Middle Ages (Böhme 1886; Bossert 1952; Clark 1950; Cossachi 1965; Hammerstein 1980; Kastner 1852).¹ Elina Gertsman, a western medieval art historian at Case Western Reserve University who has been researching the Dance of Death for nearly a decade (Gertsman 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008), far surpasses a purely archival approach to her subjects. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance explores the ways in which the visual and textual artifacts belonging to this genre “structure the experience of the viewers and are, in turn, structured by that experience” (14). Despite the universalizing message of memento mori, Gertsman embraces interdisciplinary, semiotic, and phenomenological approaches to unveil the multiplicity of meanings unleashed by interactive viewing, as well as the cultural conventions and reading practices that give rise to such diverse interpretations. As Gertsman explains, “I construct models of viewing and experiencing these images as contextualized within the late medieval cultural discourse” (14). And via this novel approach to the medieval macabre, Gertsman aims to proffer “an alternative history of medieval art,” which may broaden our understanding of the relationship between the visual, the sensual, and the devotional (17).

Gertsman begins her study by situating the Dance of Death historically. The earliest known visual motif of the danse macabre existed as a mural at the cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris (c. 1425).² Franciscan friars would deliver apocalyptic sermons before images of convulsing corpses, while the nearby charnel house provided empirical evidence of rotting flesh that contrasted with the bustling bodies of city folk. The very genesis of the Dance of Death, as portrayed by Gertsman, lies at the border between the sacred/profane, contingency/determinism, and action/immobility. During the fifteenth century, this iconographic motif spread throughout western, northern, and eastern Europe, though it is noteworthy that each...