Introduction

‘Choreomania’ borrows from and extends the Orientalist trope described by Edward W. Said: imagined as feminine, exotic, and ancient, so-called choreomaniacs were also described in colonial medical and anthropological literature as jagged and unpredictable. ‘Epidemic hysterias’ involving frenzied dancing, or individual ticking and jerking, constitute an alternative history of gestural modernity, opposite to the smooth and efficient movement of ‘torque’. The fantasy of dance-like neuromotor disorder disrupting the smooth march of modernity constitutes choreomania as a swarm-like madness whose conceptual genealogy, following Michel Foucault, can be traced through a discursive history articulated across fields. The chapter proposes to think about the movement of this writing, the archival repertoire of scenes describing disorderly movement as it circulated around the world. Choreography itself can thus be understood as an art and science of motion, in motion: ‘choreography’—writing dance—describes the imagined, and moving, borderline between figures of order and unrest.