Seeing Cynthia Norton's Dancing Squared at the Frye recently set a series of thoughts in motion for me. You can watch Robin Held and Greil Marcus discuss the piece's association with ecstatic Shaker dancing in this video segment. Ecstatic religious traditions, particularly in a Christian or western context, interest me because I spent the latter part of my teen years in the midst of what was generally dubbed The Toronto Blessing, a Charismatic revival that claimed the First Great Awakening and Jonathan Edwards as heritage. Hallmarks of this revival were fairly extreme demonstrative outbursts, often sustained for hours or days, which included spiritual drunkenness, laughter, spasms, trances, behaving like animals (dogs, lions, and birds were the common ones I remember), as well as more standard Charismatic demonstrations like being slain or falling in the Spirit. The people involved in this affair were usually very happy, and the atmosphere staged for these gatherings was generally intensely playful, permissive, euphoric. People often declared how like (or superior to) being drunk or stoned these occasions were, and while many critics of the movement claimed it was demonic or harmful, I don't think I ever witnessed anything worse than at least disjointedly silly behavior as a means of expression or as a way to rediscover the material body in a social and symbolic context and at most escapism and delusion.
Because of my interest in hysteria, I can't help but draw occasional parallels between it and much of what took place under the umbrella of the Toronto Blessing. "Mass hysteria" is nearly too easy a pejorative to sling at it, yet the overlapping characteristics of this private-made-public carnival persist, even down to the common poses and gesticulations, the spasmodic or cataleptic trances, the famous arching of the back, the visions, and even choice of animal in the case of delirious mimicry. There is no denying the catharsis of such carnival, but it is dazzling to behold the elaborate exteriorized structures erected around such practices to justify and aid their being -- and this is where the medicalization, theatricalization, and spiritualization of hysterical demonstration overlap strikingly.
Paul Richer: "The patient can also be transformed into a bird, a dog, etc., and she can be seen trying to reproduce the look of these animals. She will speak, however, and answers the questions put to her, without seeming to notice what might be contradictory in the fact of an animal using human language. And nonetheless, the patient claims to be perfectly able to see and feel her beak and feathers, or her muzzle and fur, etc." (Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman)
Freud writes of: "the 'clownism' in boys' hysteria, the imitation of animals and circus scenes...a compulsion to repeat dating from their youth [in which they] seek their satisfaction to the accompaniment of the craziest capers, somersaults and grimaces."
Here (in these aesthetically twinned outbursts) is an ostentatious example of a formalization of Bataille's great expenditure, an exercise in existing for a brief moment in an unreal (or super-real, or surreal) suspension, hovering in a childish space, where the selfishness and willfulness of this heightened experience is at the same time an emptying of self, an ecstatic, dissolving, unraveling moment that hovers at the boundary (of the idea) of death, and a transgression of the limits of jouissance, a hoarding, a greed without limits, a need to feel and be and express the ineffable at all cost.
When I think of Strindberg I immediately think of the incessant smelling of celery (lechery) and incense, whereas I think I smell incessantly the scent of cinnamon (sin, all kinds of greed and gluttony) and my nostrils will eternally be stopped up with the perfume of old churches, with the smell of oak wood and ancient wax, the stuff-smell of pews which row upon row stink of God and of all the thousands of asses that have rubbed a high shine into their interminable glassy planks. The lightning of Christ will pierce my chest continually until I am convulsing on the ground, my limbs locked in a bow, my pelvis quivering on the end of my spine, which is like a vibrating string anchored at one in on the floor, with the weight of all the earth's gross magnetism, the other end whipping about wildly, like a loose cord -- or a shimmering light -- in an imaginary windstorm.
The body has effected a perfect detachment from mind; it is set free like a kite in a windstorm (terrible freedom). Ecstasy unencumbered by liturgy is like the organs of a body set free from the confines of bones and skin: it pours out liquescent and wild, or like a vivisected animal whose bisection is not girded up with a plate of glass, which then drains, a cascade of expiring viscera out of the shell.
Such formlessness is the frisson towards which [...the choice of pronoun remains a difficulty] urgently grope.
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