The Dancing Plague

Lyrics

[Intro]
(one pair of feet on cobbles, alone, keeping time)
Strasbourg. July, fifteen eighteen. It starts with one woman.

[Verse 1]
Frau Troffea steps into the street and begins to dance.
No music. No occasion. She does not stop that day.
She does not stop that night. By the sixth day she is still going,
and by the end of the week there are thirty-four others,
and within a month there are four hundred people in the streets
of Strasbourg, dancing, and unable to explain why.

[Chorus]
The dancing plague! It is documented! Council minutes, physicians' notes,
sermons, a chronicle — this is not folklore, this is ADMIN!
And the authorities consulted the physicians, who diagnosed
"hot blood," and prescribed — God help them — MORE DANCING.
The dancing plague. They built a stage. They hired musicians.
The official municipal response was to encourage it.

[Verse 2]
So they cleared the guildhalls, and they brought in pipers,
and they paid professional dancers to keep the afflicted moving,
on the theory that the fit must be danced out to its end —
and of course it made it worse, spectacularly worse,
and people danced until they dropped, and some did not get up,
and the chronicles say fifteen a day, though nobody counted well.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Nobody knows. That's the honest end of it. Ergot poisoning,
mass psychogenic illness, a religious trance, extreme stress
in a year of famine and disease and a city at the edge —
every theory has a hole in it and none of them is agreed.
Four hundred people danced in a European city for a month
and we have the paperwork and we do not know why.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the feet, still going, alone again)
She was the first.
Nobody ever found out why she started.