Command performance

As children, we dance with wild abandon, barely attentive or responsive to the presence of our parents or our friends, or even to the music that has sent us into a whirling, stomping frenzy in the first place. As children, we are primal, we are essential, we are unfettered, unafraid and unembarrassed. But people change.

Dance may well have been the first activity to establish a group dynamic among primitive man. However hunting may have joined us in common cause, dance made us a tribe. Dance has remained significant through the ages but its significance has changed as we've gotten more sophisticated... becoming more of a societal than a social activity and less of an invitation than an obligation. With that in mind, I approach my topic of joyless, obligatory dancing or dancing on command.

Terence Fisher's CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961) begins most unexpectedly, with a prologue not concerned with super-nature but with super-society. The setting is 18th century Spain, as a wandering beggar (Richard Wordsworth) is turned away from a village inn and directed to the castello of the local Marquis, who is known for his cruelty and heartlessness but at least has the money to give away.

Received with an ironic show of bonhomie by the Marquis (Anthony Dawson), who is celebrating his wedding to a pretty young thing (Josephine Llewellyn), the beggar pleads his case. He's hungry, thirsty and exhausted from wandering and asks only some meager sustenance. Not being accustomed to giving away something for nothing, the Marquis strikes a characteristically cruel bargain...

... informing the beggar that they'll feed him if only he sings them a song. But the beggar confesses he has no voice for song.

"Then you must dance," the Marquis demands. (I'm paraphrasing.) "Dance for your supper!" The Marquis commands the band to strike up a jaunty tune.

The beggar is weak, enfeebled. He is a simple man without the simplest of means or comforts and yet he understands that this is the only way he can fill his belly. And so he begins to move.

He's pretty bad.

But he makes a good show of it, smiling broadly for the assembled swells and kicking up his feet.

The Marquis thinks this is pretty goddamned funny and eggs him on, empowering the beggar to make bold moves, even sweeping a goblet of wine off the dinner table and downing it in one gulp.

His stomach being empty, the wine goes right to the beggar's head, making his movements even more pathetic...

... but his choices bold and exaggerated, much to the amusement of the wedding party. Twirling his own ragged cape from around his bony shoulders...

... the beggar attempts a matador's flourish...

... but the accumulation of hunger, exhaustion and heady spirits overturn his frail form, sending him crashing to the cold marble floor.

Any kid who has ever been compelled to perform in some way for a party of drunken adults will find plenty to shudder at in this scene from CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, which as I've indicated above contains nary a supernatural element but nonetheless sets into motion, through plain old human cruelty, a chain of events that culminates in monstrosity and horror. This scene has equivalents in the western genre, whenever the bad guys shoot at an old man's feet to get him to "dance" or make a poor old rummy perform for one lousy shot of busthead, and in crime films or other dramas where convicts take women hostage and make them dance (even as a kid, dancing in this context seemed to me an obvious surrogate for rape.). The connection of cruelty to dancing was established for me as a child and the beggar's humiliation at the hands of the Marquis (and it actually gets worse from here on) continues to haunt me as an adult, both on and off the dance floor.

This was written in conjunction with Marilyn Ferdinand's Invitation to the Dance Movie Blog-a-Thon going on all week over at Ferdy on Film.