Jonathan Glaz­er and Mica Levi team up for ​‘danc­ing plague’ film

As the his­to­ry books would have us believe it, once upon a time in the town of Stras­bourg, the locals suc­cumbed to an unusu­al strain of mania. A so-called ​‘danc­ing plague’ hit the bor­der between France and Ger­many in 1518, incit­ing vil­lagers to get their groove on for such stag­ger­ing lengths of time, and with such all-con­sum­ing inten­si­ty, that scores are report­ed to have perished.

This being so long ago, many ele­ments of the record remain fuzzy. (Experts dis­agree over the ori­gin of this odd afflic­tion, the num­ber of casu­al­ties has been esti­mat­ed as any­where from 50 to 400, and some author­i­ties doubt that any­one even died from danc­ing at all.) But that’s of no mat­ter to Jonathan Glaz­er, who has ori­ent­ed his lat­est short film around the sym­bol­ic sig­nif­i­cance of this strange 16^th-cen­tu­ry footnote.

A press release tied to the BBC’s Cul­ture in Quar­an­tine ini­tia­tive announced today that Glaz­er will bring his new project Stras­bourg 1518 to BBC Two on 20 July, a ​“col­lab­o­ra­tion in iso­la­tion” that sees the music video vet­er­an team­ing with the elite dance com­pa­ny Sadler’s Wells. Filmed dur­ing the lock­down, the pre­sump­tive dance sequences will be sound­tracked by Mica Levi, com­pos­er of the haunt­ing score for Glazer’s most recent fea­ture Under the Skin.

The res­o­nance of that far-flung cor­ner of his­to­ry to our present moment is clear; every­one feels a lit­tle stir-crazy right now, trapped in our flats with no end in sight, and danc­ing may be the only reli­able way to get the ya-yas out. How dif­fer­ent is the con­stant low-grade crazi­ness of our pan­dem­ic-dri­ven self-con­tain­ment from the viral fever that descend­ed on Alsace all those years ago, really?

This comes hot on the heels of Glazer’s last short-form vis­it to BBC Two, the eerie and con­cep­tu­al vision of ter­ror The Fall, which pre­miered last Octo­ber. His games with con­cen­tric squares and frames-with­in-frames sug­gest­ed a phase of for­mal exper­i­men­ta­tion, a rest­less streak that we may safe­ly expect to breathe jit­tery life into Stras­bourg 1518.

Stras­bourg 1518 will pre­mière on BBC Two on 20 July at 10pm GMT.