6 Choreomanias Movements Through Our Body Stephen Muecke Performance Research 8(4), pp.6–10 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2003 The notion of collectivity carries a nostalgic charge, in Marxism and its derived discourses especially, such that only groups acting in concert are seen to exert the power sufficient to change social arrange- ments. This nostalgia is present to the extent that collective action seems increasingly difficult or outmoded, relegated to the status of the ‘primitive’. Primitive participation in ritual is intensely sincere, it is loaded with faith, so such participation could hardly be mediated by intellectual detachment, irony or physical distance. Primitive participations are corporeal and, it would seem, fully ‘engaging’ of all the capacities of the body. Conversely, modernity has seen the rise of indi- viduation of bodies (which is how medicine treats them), along with the ideological individuation of the person. Ulrich Beck has argued that ‘the basic figure of fully developed modernity is the single person’ (Beck 1992: 122). 1 The debate in modernist studies about whether or not ‘primitivity’ can in fact be ‘left behind’ like some historical residue is pertinent here, as I argue that ‘collective madnesses’ enthusing or mobilizing collective bodies have existed in the past. Because they enigmatically escape the explanatory frameworks of ‘individual’ disciplines or modes of thought, I think that modes of individuation (of thought and its practical appli- cation to the treatment of illness) might have to be revised towards a greater recognition of the multi- plicities of factors that traverse our bodies. Only theories of complexity and interdisciplinary appara- tuses can hope to come to terms with this situation, which has nothing to do with nostalgia for lost community or community action, and everything to do with the fact that when the search for causes in individual bodies reaches practical and theoretical limits, then we have to turn to the more biophilo- sophical position which asserts that multiple life forms circulate in and beyond individual bodies as epidemics, and even less materially as codes and forces on life-enhancing missions feeding and starving each other in particular ecological environ- ments. In many cases, even the dead are still part of the equation for life. The Madagascans, obsessed as they are with death and their ancestors, become possessed – some of them – by spirits of the dead (Sharp 1996). They may come to them in dreams, or they may perma- nently occupy individuals. In the northern parts of the island, the possessed are most often older single women, and they are possessed by spirits called tromba, who are actually royal ancestors. The possessed might dress up in the style and period of the King or Queen inside them. This kind of pos- session may or may not be quite unrelated to an episode of choreomania, noticed in the late 19th century and reported by James Sibree early in Maurice Bloch’s book, Placing the Dead: The Imanenjana, or Dancing Mania In the month of February 1863, the Europeans resident at Antananarivo (Tananarive),the capital of Madagascar, began to hear rumours of a new disease, which it was said had appeared in the west or south-west.The name given to it by the natives was imanenjana, and the dancers were called ramanenjana, which probably comes