Dancing with death has continually captured the choreographic imaginary. As morbidly parodic as prancing skeletons may seem, post-medieval dance appropriates the medieval macabre to serve specific aesthetical, cultural, and political agendas. The Willis of Giselle (1841), by hybridizing choreomania (dance mania) and the danse macabre, heighten the dark side of Romanticism. Mary Wigman's Totentanz (1917) employs spirit possession and the occult to underscore the inner struggle between death and the dying. Marcia Siegel has demonstrated how Kurt Jooss's The Green Table (1932) drew inspiration from the Totentanz cycle at Lübeck (1989,15–21). Kate Elswit has examined the choreographic experiments of Weimar Berlin in which the medieval motif served as a starting point for an eventual erosion of allegory (Reference Elswit2009, 78–80). Realigning the theme with a Symbolist aesthetic, Roland Petit's Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (1946) recasts death as a femme fatale. José Limón created Danza de la Muerte (1937) in response to the Spanish Civil War. Likewise, Christopher Bruce's Ghost Dances (1981) resituates the macabre to express the oppression of modern Chileans under a corrupt government. Exploring the dynamics of opposition, Agnes de Mille returned to the reified duality between life and death in The Other (1992). David Parsons (Ring Around the Rosie, 1993), Bill T. Jones (Still/Here, 1997), and Matthew Hart (Dances with Death, 1998) reimagined the plague-inspired Dance of Death as a lament for AIDS victims. And most recently, Amy Seiwert (Requiem, 2011) has colored the macabre movement with psychoanalytic theory. Although numerous post-medieval representations of the Dance of Death have multiplied, reconfigured, and complicated its significance, the same cannot be said for studies pertaining to the origins of this spectacle—until recently.

Much of the past scholarship on the medieval Dance of Death ultimately reduces the dance's signification to one ontological distillation: death conquers all. Earlier scholarly output, mainly in the form of textual and iconographic compendia, is analytically disconnected from the religious and social change of the late Middle Ages (Böhme Reference Böhme1886; Bossert Reference Bossert1952; Clark Reference Clark1950; Cossachi Reference Cossachi1965; Hammerstein Reference Hammerstein1980; Kastner Reference Kastner1852).Footnote ¹ Elina Gertsman, a western medieval art historian at Case Western Reserve University who has been researching the Dance of Death for nearly a decade (Gertsman Reference Gertsman2003, Reference Gertsman2005, Reference Gertsman2006, Reference Gertsman2008), far surpasses a purely archival approach to her subjects. The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance explores the ways in which the visual and textual artifacts belonging to this genre “structure the experience of the viewers and are, in turn, structured by that experience” (14). Despite the universalizing message of memento mori, Gertsman embraces interdisciplinary, semiotic, and phenomenological approaches to unveil the multiplicity of meanings unleashed by interactive viewing, as well as the cultural conventions and reading practices that give rise to such diverse interpretations. As Gertsman explains, “I construct models of viewing and experiencing these images as contextualized within the late medieval cultural discourse” (14). And via this novel approach to the medieval macabre, Gertsman aims to proffer “an alternative history of medieval art,” which may broaden our understanding of the relationship between the visual, the sensual, and the devotional (17).

Gertsman begins her study by situating the Dance of Death historically. The earliest known visual motif of the danse macabre existed as a mural at the cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris (c. 1425).Footnote ² Franciscan friars would deliver apocalyptic sermons before images of convulsing corpses, while the nearby charnel house provided empirical evidence of rotting flesh that contrasted with the bustling bodies of city folk. The very genesis of the Dance of Death, as portrayed by Gertsman, lies at the border between the sacred/profane, contingency/determinism, and action/immobility. During the fifteenth century, this iconographic motif spread throughout western, northern, and eastern Europe, though it is noteworthy that each representation displayed regional variants in its spatial/architectural orientation, textual/visual content, and moralizing message. While Gertsman does not causally anchor the proliferation of such imagery (i.e., as an effect of the Black Death and its cyclical aftermath),Footnote ³ she sees the emergence of the macabre as “a reflection of late medieval anxieties about the nature of bodily death and its spiritual consequences” (44). The most salient question posed in her first chapter, “Framing the Dance of Death,” is why dance became the preferred mode of representing death. For how can death, as absolute absence, be rendered by the radically present phenomenon of dance?

Chapters 2 and 3, “Dancing the Dance of Death” and “Performing the Dance of Death,” respectively, provide the most useful evidence and analysis for dance studies scholars and early dance historians. Here Gertsman reconsiders the Dance of Death within the contradictory context of medieval dance. Drawing from a heterogeneous primary source base (including sermons, epigraphic remains, biblical exegesis, city statutes, pastoral manuals, dance iconography, and quattrocento dance treatises), Gertsman traces the macabre's maturation diachronically. The association between dance and death hearkens back to pagan and early Christian funerary rites. The close proximity between embodied movement and bodily expiration endowed dance with its own afterlife. On the one hand, neo-Platonists, the Church Fathers, and medieval theologians formed corollaries between earthly dances and the heavenly cosmos. On the other hand, medieval clerics denounced dance in order to differentiate themselves from their non-Christian counterparts; in this latter case, dancing leads to damnation and the devil. Synchronically speaking, the various Dance of Death cycles refer and respond to contradictory discourses on dance in the Middle Ages. Gertsman argues that in these images, which juxtapose the living and the dead, dance operates as a sign of death (albeit a sign ridden with instability). Since these two polarities are brought together in continuous processionals, dancing no longer opposes death, but comes to signify it. According to Gertsman, the semiotic agency of dance operates as a vehicle of displacement: “I suggest that the Dance of Death can be construed as a pictorial response to, and visual commemoration of, the moment of passing, the moment of ‘taking away.’ The painting shows the viewer what it is that death takes; in other words, Death assumes those attributes of the living it robs them of: the ability to move, the ability to speak, and, ultimately, their presence” (69). With this mode of reframing, Gertsman inverts the universalizing tendency. If any essentialized reading could be ascribed to the dance element of the Dance of Death, the only viable one would be that death's dance is a sign of mutability and change.

While most scholars view the Dance of Death as merely secular and grotesque imagery, Gertsman places the gestural and directional components of the dance into conversation with liturgical processions, morality plays, and court dramas (Chapter 3). In the dancers' corporeal comportment—at once solemn and mocking—“movement is the first sign of the performativity of the Dance of Death, encoded both in the expressive movement of bodies and in the explicit gestures achieved by these bodies” (82). Playing with the medieval notion of gesture as a visual index to the state of one's soul, the perpetual flux of bodily gesticulation demands hermeneutical gymnastics and enables dialogical participation. When addressing the images' accompanying inscriptions, Gertsman argues that, due to their conversational format, “the simultaneous identification and distancing, empathy and disconnection, are effective: as the participants in the Dance of Death work through their individual crises with death, the viewers are left to undergo their own conflicts” (92). Moreover, the repetitious structure of the verses shapes its reception. Repeatability suggests security, yet the medieval anxiety over a sudden, premature, or unpredictable death tinged life with incertitude. In this push/pull dynamic, “the verses engage the viewers by simultaneously attracting and repulsing, involving and repelling them” (93).

The final two chapters consider viewer responses to Dance of Death cycles in their original spatial, urban, and devotional contexts. In her fourth chapter, “Reading the Dance of Death,” Gertsman does a careful reading of a well-preserved Dance of Death painting in Reval (present day Tallinn, Estonia). Painted by Bernt Notke during the late fifteenth century, this depiction is located in the chapel of St. Anthony in St. Nicholas Church. In historicizing this imagery, Gertsman stresses the importance of Reval's participation in the Hanseatic League, thereby shaping the congregation with a mercantile constitution in which the church operated as the site of religious and secular activity. The church's proximity to the Town Hall (where both pre-Lenten dances and public executions were held) further endows Notke's panel with multiple associations. The figural representations comprising this cycle, appearing life-sized and arranged panoramically, enable an active reception of both the text and image that entails the viewer's own kinetic engagement. The skeletons' grotesque jig may have reminded the viewers of their own carnivalesque diversions, as well as the transitory nature of their own material bodies and commodities. The dancers appear aggrandized against a miniaturized cityscape, thereby perspectivally demarcating the nostalgic world of living from the unknown world of the dead. The presence of a preacher in the Reval painting, however, tempers any one-sided interpretation. His moralizing stance articulates a space for preparation (i.e., pre-mortem repentance) within death's disorder, and thereby gestures toward redemptive possibilities. Gertsman's investigation into the performance-based confrontation and contemplation of the Reval cycle underscores how meaning is engendered and negotiated through this particular mode of engagement.

In “Transforming the Dance of Death” (chapter 5), Gertsman contextualizes numerous Dance of Death cycles in order to accentuate the variations of viewing practices and semantic content generated by them. A late fifteenth-century danse macabre fresco at La Chaise-Dieu (a Benedictine monastery in the Auvergne region) depicts a group of processants who exude far less precision in their trajectories than the Reval figures. Curiously, at La Chaise-Dieu, a pictorial portrayal of Adam and Eve lies in close contiguity with the macabre imagery. The insertion of an original sin motif into the Dance of Death transforms the cycle into “a vast drama of human history by reinserting the process of dying within the framework of the larger chronicle of mankind, which, however, pictures not only the tragic and omits the hopeful” (134). Interestingly, the arbitrariness signified by the Dance of Death at La Chaise-Dieu undergoes an inversion in the near-contemporary Totentanz cycle at the Church of St. Mary in Berlin. Here a farandole-pattern of clerical figures dances towards an image of the crucified Christ, whereas the row of seculars gravitates toward the opposite direction, thereby kinetically invoking the Last Judgment. The equalizing thrust of death has been deconstructed by, and subsumed into, medieval soteriology. Regardless of the variety of readings, Gertsman claims that the act of interpreting the Dance of Death depends upon the viewer's own performance:

Indeed, as Gertsman's Epilogue explains, the advent of printing and transition to private reading reconstituted the Dance of Death into portable texts and images. What was once punctuated by live performance and corporeal confrontation began to recede into disembodied engagement and private contemplation.

This monograph, with its rich historical underpinnings, detailed readings, and revisionist analysis, is a welcome (and much overdue) addition to the medieval Dance of Death scholarly corpus. Gertsman's extensive use of primary sources—ranging from chronicles, inventory records, theological tractates, secular poetry, liturgical drama, and preaching manuals—undergird her recalibration of the Dance of Death as lying at the intersection between pastoral theology, lay piety, social stratification, and embodied performance. The sheer amount of scholarly labor that went into this study (accessing obscure archival material, photographing monuments all over Europe, and obtaining permission to publish nearly two hundred images), already justifies its costliness. As a bonus, Gertsman has included appendices of additional source material (Spanish, French, and German Dance of Death plays and poems) that she transcribed. Informed by theorists as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Erving Goffman, Meyer Schapiro, Sigmund Freud, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Zumthor, and others, Gertsman articulates a new modality of interactive sensory engagement that speaks to medievalists and non-medievalists alike. While Gertsman's treatment of gender and musicology are noticeably thin,Footnote ⁴ her exposition of the macabre's haunting sense of intimacy reveals how the medieval subject simultaneously beholds his/her own animation and annihilation. Rather than literalizing death, this monograph explores how such representations dance between absence and omnipresence.

The scholarly importance of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages is, I contend, threefold. First, Gertsman makes an important contribution to premodern visual culture. (In fact, this monograph is part of a series on Studies in Medieval Visual Culture.) Instead of equating medieval iconography with orthodox doctrine (and thereby privileging text over image), Gertsman demonstrates how bodily engagement with these images is defined by, and redefines, theological premises and access to the holy. Whereas the agency of the visual object has been explored in exciting ways within Byzantine studies (Isar Reference Isar2003, Reference Isar2005, Reference Isar and Lidov2006; Lidov Reference Lidov and Lidov2006; Pentcheva Reference Pentcheva2006, Reference Pentcheva2009, Reference Pentcheva2010), performance-based studies on visuality of the Latin west have failed to be as heuristically fruitful. A comparable study is perhaps harder for western medieval Christianity since, as indicated by the orthodox luminary Thomas Aquinas, images should only be used to facilitate devotion, rather than be venerated as fetishized idols. By recontextualizing medieval viewing practices within their proper liturgical spaces, Gertsman reinvigorates the creative dynamics between the viewer and the viewed. To borrow the language of Walter Benjamin, this re-auratization of the art object endows the act of seeing with wonder, novelty, and unpredictability.

Second, Gertsman's analysis furthers the subfield of historical semiotics. In tandem with the historical semiotic anthropology of Richard Parmentier, the Dance of Death operates as both a sign of and a sign in history. With the former, a society objectifies its own past. In the latter framing, societal signs are preserved as repositories of the past or are constantly modified by social change, and therefore accrue the complexity of historical processes. A diachronic analysis of signs placed in tandem with the social dynamics at work in a given culture can be mutually informing (Parmentier Reference Parmentier1994; Parmentier and Mertz Reference Parmentier and Mertz1985). In her historically embedded use of semiotics, Gertsman shows how the Dance of Death maps history onto the dead body while allowing the same body to be resignified in the immediate act of its perception. The fact that the Dance of Death retains resignifying power over time (through the music of Camille Saint-Saëns, Hector Berlioz, and The Dead Can Dance; the visual art of James Ensor and Thomas Rowlandson; the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Johann von Goethe; and the films of Ingmar Bergman) only enhances its semiotic malleability.

With that being said, however, Gertsman's study would have been better informed by medieval semiology. Long before Roland Barthes deciphered the cultural codes underlying bourgeois Parisian culture, St. Augustine, in his De doctrina christiana, put forth a theory of signs that ruminated over their conventionality. While Augustine desired transparency between the signifier and the signified, he explains that most signs have been relegated to a mere footprint [vestigium] of accuracy during the post-lapsarian age. Late medieval concerns over deception (including the possible simulation of transubstantiation) and the rise of nominalism contributed to an increased instability between word and thing. These philosophical tensions open up an appropriate avenue for thinking about the Dance of Death in relation to medieval sign theory. The Chaise-Dieu, which for Gertsman exemplifies death's indeterminacy, may be interpreted as partaking in a similar epistemological crisis.

Finally, Gertsman's gift to dance studies is perhaps the most intriguing contribution. Besides being directly invested in addressing the under-represented history of medieval dance, Gertsman indirectly participates in broader theoretical concerns across dance studies. Dance historians have routinely lamented over the problem of absence. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges in dance research lies in the inevitable impermanence of dance. According to dance critic Marcia Siegel, “Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point. … It is an event that disappears in the very act of materializing” (Reference Siegel1972, 1). Since the dynamism of dance cannot be captured in the more enduring media of words, images, or the plastic arts, ephemerality has long been regarded as problematic in dance scholarship, especially for those scholars examining dance phenomena prior to the practice of choreographic notation or filmic representation. The fact that we do not have access to the historical performances of dancing bodies in the Middle Ages renders daunting the scholar's task of reconstructing performance from archival fragments.

The current state of dance studies, however, has come to valorize absence. Mark Franko employs the Derridean trace to complicate the presumed dichotomy between dance and text (Reference Franko, Goellner and Murphy1995, 205–16). In following, André Lepecki contends that the very notion of presence is a product of a post-Enlightenment sensibility (Reference Lepecki and Lepecki2004, 124–39). Given its association between dancing and dying, the medieval Dance of Death danse macabre can be productively situated within this discussion. Rather than dismiss dance's transience, the Dance of Death exploits ephemerality in order to signify death and impress its significance onto the viewer's memory. And, in presaging Gertsman's newest work on facial gesture (Gertsman Reference Gertsman2010), her rethinking of emotion may also form a dialogue with the theoretical formulations of Carrie Noland, whose analysis of the kinesthetic aspect of emotion demonstrates how psychosomatic activity participates in the shaping of culture (Noland Reference Noland2009, 56–92). The Dance of Death, now restaged as an interactive performance teeming with anxiety, sensuality, and ambivalence, may help us to understand why so many people for so long have been dying to dance.