The Dancing Plague

This utterly original graphic novel tells the true story of when hundreds of a town's inhabitants were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance.

The Dancing Plague is a visually striking graphic work about the 1518 Strasbourg “dancing plague,” using embroidery and pyrography to turn medieval mass hysteria into something darkly beautiful and unsettling on the page. It shows how art can make even a half‑forgotten catastrophe feel immediate again.

The story is told from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of the witnesses. Prone to mystic visions as a child, betrayed in the convent to which she flees, then abused by her loutish husband, Mary endures her life as an oppressed and ultimately scapegoated woman with courage, strength, and inspiring beauty.

As difficult to interpret now (as a psychological reaction to social injustice?) as it was then (as a collective demonic possession?), the story of the “Dancing Plague” finds suitably extraordinary expression in the unique mixed-media style Gareth Brookes has devised to tell it.

The pioneering blend of his trademark “pyrographic” technique with sumptuously colorful―and literal―embroidery perfectly reflects, in a beautiful work of art, the enduring fragility of our human condition.

“The most visually stunning quarantine comic I’ve seen is THE DANCING PLAGUE by the British artist Gareth Brookes . . . With fire and needle, Brookes crafts a book the likes of which we’ve never seen before.” – The New York Times
 
 

Gareth Brookes studied printmaking at the Royal College of Art. His graphic novels include A Thousand Coloured Castles (2017) and The Black Project, which was nominated for an award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2018. His work has appeared in ArtReview, been published by Kuš, and was included in the Comics Unmasked exhibition at the British Library in 2014. He is based in the United Kingdom.