Film series: Choreomania 11 November 2020 – 20 January 2021

How does a dance scene make you feel? Dance on screen has eruptive energies: sensuous, social, sudden. Exuberant physicality can make you hold your breath or want to join in. Choreomania (11 November 2020 – 20 January 2021) brings together Hollywood high-gloss fantasias, new-age musicals, a lost disco film and acclaimed contemporary cinema from around the globe.

In this film series, dance exudes an optimism that is sometimes contagious, sometimes cruel. For every frothy chorus line, there’s a backstage meltdown. For every shimmy towards the good life, there’s a cynical wink.

In these films, high kicks and hair flips are infectious. Friends, lovers and strangers meet, and when they do their bodies seem to catch fire. The flash-dancing Nicholas brothers vie to outdo each another in all-Black MGM musical Stormy weather. Bodies assemble en masse in set pieces ranging from Busby Berkeley’s showstoppers to Uday Shankar’s rarely screened celebration of Indian dance traditions, Kalpana. There is call and response between films across decades. Chantal Akerman’s Golden eighties pays tribute to Jacques Demy’s Young girls of Rochefort, which is in turn a pastel-hued homage to Gene Kelly in On the town.

When do dancers spin out of control? There’s a fine line between euphoric release and unwilled compulsion. The series takes inspiration from ‘choreomania’, a term given to an uncontrollable urge to dance, often in a frenzied and convulsive manner. Throughout the middle ages, outbreaks of dancing plagues saw people moving involuntarily for days or even weeks on end. Mysterious somatic ailments arise throughout the series from a 17th-century Polish convent (Mother Joan of the angels) to the Russian ballet (Powell and Pressburger’s The red shoes) and the rehearsal halls of a drill dance troupe (The fits). The endurance feats of the original dancing plagues return in Sydney Pollack’s devastating classic They shoot horses, don’t they?

This summer, spanning breakdance and kathakali, tap and hip hop, ballet and Javanese lengger, Choreomania summons the shadow side of the sunniest of film genres.

Films

• 8 November – A page of madness (director Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japan, 1926, 35mm)

• 11 November – 42nd Street (director Lloyd Bacon, US, 1933, 35mm)

• 15 November – Stormy weather (director Andrew L Stone, US, 1943, 35mm-to-digital)

• 18 November – They shoot horses, don’t they? (director Sydney Pollack, US, 1969, 35mm)

• 22 November – Mother Joan of the angels (director Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Poland, 1961, 35mm-to-digital)

• 25 November – On the town (directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, US, 1949, 35mm)

• 29 November – Will you dance with me? (director Derek Jarman, UK, 1984, digital)

• 2 December – The red shoes (director Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1948, 35mm)

• 6 December – Kalpana (director Uday Shankar, India, 1948, 35mm-to-digital)

• 9, 13 December – Young girls of Rochefort (director Jacques Demy, France, 1967, 35mm-to-digital)

• 16, 20 December – Golden eighties (director Chantal Akerman, France, 1986, 35mm-to-digital)

• 6 January – All that jazz (director Bob Fosse, US, 1979, 35mm)

• 10 January – The fits (director Anna Rose Holmer, US, 2016, digital)

• 13 January – Madeline’s Madeline (director Josephine Decker, US, 2018, digital)

• 20 January – Memories of my body (director Garin Nugroho, Indonesia, 2018, digital)