Steal This: A Music Video Based on the Dancing Plague of 1518
Okay this is one I’d love to see come to fruition, but alas I am not a musician, and the musicians around me have no reason to give me full creative control. But I think it could be great… and relatively low budget, even.
First some cliffnotes on the dancing plague of 1518:
One woman randomly starts dancing down the street, spastically, barefoot, and apparently cannot stop.
Hundreds more people join in???
They dance until they collapse in exhaustion, only to get up and do it again once they wake up (IF they wake up…some dance themselves to death.)
The doctors say they have “hot blood” and need to dance it out. The church says they pissed off a Saint and he’s possessing them as punishment.
The city tries setting up dance halls with live music so they can “dance it out”, but that doesn’t work. Then they go full Footloose and make dancing illegal, which also doesn’t work.
Finally they start shipping people off to some shrine devoted to the pissed-off saint, where they dance in special blesséd red shoes… which seems to work? Maybe? In any case it dies down eventually, as suddenly as it started.
Modern historians & psychologists think this was a mass-hysteria event brought on by excess stress, possibly especially affecting women (given their shit station in life at the time), mixed with religious fanaticism.
Stress, misogyny and religious nutjobbery - sound familiar?
So the video: The dancing plague, but modern day. A perfectly-coiffed suburban mom having a shouting match with her husband in the kitchen, until suddenly she starts dancing and can’t stop. She’s panicked - what’s happening? Why is her body doing this?? - he’s confused, and even more angry…until he starts boogying too. She kicks off her shoes and takes to the streets of their McMansion-y housing development, where more and more people join her. They dance through town, their numbers steadily growing.
Cut to the politicians, frantically trying to solve the problem. Some of them start dancing too, oh noooo!
We set up night clubs for them, we set up school gyms with under-the-sea themes. No good. People are collapsing in exhaustion, people are keeling over.
Time to take a hard line, no more dancing! The cops come! Riot shields! Tear gas! But uh oh… now the cops are dancing.
Anyway, you get the gist. Handle the ritualistic shrine part however you like. I think with the right song it could be pretty fantastic and I don’t *think* it’s been done before, at least with a heavy 1518 reference. Closest thing I’ve found is this absolute indie sleaze dance-zombie gem, Thriller,
and like… a dozen cheesy renditions of “Dancing in the Street”. Though I’ll admit than when I picture “spastically dancing down the street” I just keep thinking about this guy…