National Hellenic Research Foundation-École française d’Athènes, conference Performing & Healing in Antiquity; paper entitled: Dance, Possession, and Therapy between Antiquity and the Middle Ages (29 April 2026)

Dance is a complex signifier which defies a single definition. Changing meanings with positive or negative judgements have been intrinsic features of descriptions of dance since Antiquity; it has always been a question of the onlooker’s gaze. As well as a practice in itself, dance is also a secondary phenomenon which is often – though not necessarily – variously associated with music, including the spheres of theatre, liturgy, and worship. It is also frequently linked to descriptions of states of malaise, so much so that the terms chorea and ballism are associated with a huge range of movement disorders (chorea syndromes) in twenty-first-century neurology. These brain dysfunctions are characterised by an inability to control bodily movements, to the point that they become sudden, rapid, variable, violent and disjointed. The term chorea derives from the Greek word choreia, which means “dance”. The latter concept has significant Platonic connotations, inasmuch as it was used to refer to the exemplary form of community life in the Ideal City, with a perfectly harmonised chorus of citizens in which each member adhered to their political and social role without any dissonance, excess, or unauthorised input. This paper will analyse different types of sources – literary, legal, and homiletic – in an attempt to understand the transition in the connotation of dance from the expression of a perfect state of health, (not only of the individual, but the entire community) to certain movement disorders in medical contexts from the early modern period onwards. The complex relationship between gesture, religion and illness/treatment will be investigated from a historical perspective, with a particular focus on the performative power of images. The power of images, even immaterial ones such as theatre and music, could influence the mind (imago + actio = imagination/fantasy) and generate states of physical and psychological suffering (melancholy), which took shape in forms of bodily restlessness sometimes described as dance. Taking root in the Middle Ages, this concept contributed to the association between dance and illness in the modern age. The connection between imagination and unharmonious movement is already evident in the earliest medical texts on tarantism, which was classed as a melancholic disease during the Renaissance period; it was imagination that compelled the possessed to move. In these contexts, dance is both a symptom of suffering and an element of the cure.