Coda

Modernity can be understood as the cultivation of a fantasy about the past: in the case of choreomania, this ‘past’ was imagined as a rumbling horde, a Bacchic chorus against which purposeful ‘modernity’ positioned itself. Meaningless gesture, after Agamben, epitomized in the nineteenth century in the figure of ‘chorea’, similarly became with the scientific discourse on choreomania a manner of thinking modernity’s double movement, forward and back, between efficient industrialization and the collective archaicity out of which this efficiency imagined itself to arise. Reperforming my own archival return to the still ‘living’ site of the Echternach dancing procession, I discover that the ever more institutionalized event highlights the power of choreopolitical organization displayed by the nation state. As in Meige’s day, the procession has been evacuated of nervous disorder or bodily disruption. My archival reperformance reveals an experience of historicity shorn of a historical encounter.