Insights for Andersen's The Red Shoes: The people who 'danced themselves to death' by Rosalind Jana

 

BBC News published an interesting article about "dance plagues" or choreomania. These phenomena are part of what inspired Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes."

Read the full article at The people who 'danced themselves to death' by Rosalind Jana (12th May 2022).

Here's an excerpt to perhaps catch your interest (the inserted links below are to the mentioned items on Amazon):

Uncontrollable dance has a bewitching effect on those who contemplate it. One only has to think of the popular Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Red Shoes, with its cursed scarlet leather slippers that condemn their owner into a dance so tortuous that she eventually finds an executioner to hack off her own feet. It is a horrible tale, and people love it. Although its moral implications are relatively straightforward (a good old dose of punishment for vanity: the shoes' wearer put through this ordeal because she dared to covet such beautiful footwear in the first place), its darker suggestions of possession and incessant movement have inspired numerous works including a Powell and Pressburger film, a Kate Bush album, and several ballets.

This summer, the dance plague itself returns in earnest. Florence + The Machine's fifth album Dance Fever, released today, takes its cues from the unstoppable impulses of choreomania. The accompanying release notes outline frontwoman Florence Welch's interest in this volatile meeting point between energetic motion and moral panic, as well as touching on the subject's obvious resonance on an album recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when "the whirl of movement and togetherness" was both missed and anticipated. A dance plague is an apt theme for someone who wants to explore uncertainty and change. The opening lines of the song Choreomania – written before the pandemic – are uncannily prescient: "And I'm freaking out in the middle of the street / With the complete conviction of someone who has never actually had anything really bad happen to them." It's also apt for a singer so consistently preoccupied by the body as a tool of expression. Music videos for the album's singles King and Heaven is Here feature the same group of dancers who writhe around Welch, their motions uninhibited as they stamp their feet and dash their skirts.

A book to learn even more is mentioned in the article:

A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 by John Waller

After one woman had danced to exhaustion in Strasbourg in July 1518, the dancing sickness quickly escalated into an epidemic that lasted over a month, with many people dying after dancing with crazed abandon for days. This study tells the story of the dancing plague, evokes the sights and sounds of the afflicted city and seeks to explain why people lapsed into that state of frantic delirium.

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Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes Airing 9/17/2021 on PBS Great Performances

 

Great Performances on PBS will be airing Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes on September 17, 2021. Bourne is well-known for his interpretations of Sleeping Beauty, The Red Shoes, Swan Lake and Cinderella. 

From PBS:

Experience Hans Christian Andersen’s dark fairytale from acclaimed director-choreographer Matthew Bourne with this Olivier Award-winning stage adaptation starring Ashley Shaw, Adam Cooper, Dominic North and Michaela Meazza.

The Red Shoes at Tales of Faerie

Kristin at Tales of Faerie posted yesterday about The Red Shoes: The Red Shoes: Encouraging judging or discouraging materialism? This fairy tale isn't discussed as often but remains a favorite and touch point for many women. Kristin addresses some of those issues with a personal essay.

Here's the first few paragraphs:

"The Red Shoes" by Hans Christian Andersen is a fairly standard tale in which a girl is punished for vainly wearing red shoes. After going from poverty to a more comfortable situation, Karen wears her new red shoes to inappropriate situations; one day, she goes dancing and the shoes won't stop dancing. Her feet must be cut off before she can regain control, and after that she becomes a penitant Christian, sworn to simplicity.

Andersen obviously felt quite strongly about red shoes. And while most would agree that vanity can go too far, the punishment far outweighs the crime. While red shoes themselves aren't quite as taboo anymore, the concept of judging people by what they choose to wear is still very prevalent (hello, popular TLC show "What not to Wear"). Read the rest...

Poem of the Day: When I Wore Red Shoes by Eliza Cook

When I Wore Red Shoes
by Eliza Cook

“WHEN I wore red shoes!” Ah me!
Simple as the words may be,
Yet these simple words can bring
The peacock feather of Time’s wing,
And flutter it before my eyes
In all its vivid pristine dyes.
What were Cinderella’s slippers
To my pair of fairy trippers?
No heart gives such ecstatic thumps
In spur-deck’d boots or perfum’d pumps,
As mine did when I strutted out
To show my fine red shoes about,
Most truly then my tiny toes
Walk’d in a path “couleur de rose,”
As, marching forth, I sought the street,
My head fill’d, choke-full, with my feet.
Proud and happy thing was I,
Amid the world’s enchanted views;
When hair and sash-ends used to fly,
And I wore red shoes.

How they used to flit and shine
O’er the chalky zig-zag line,
As with Taglioni tread
I moved where “Hop Scotch” maps were-spread!
How rich their contrast as they plied
In kicks on Pincher’s jetty side;
Till “tantrums” made it hard to trace
Which were the reddest, shoes or face!
Oh, Pincher! Pincher! it was you
That shared the scolding and “to-do,”
When I had join’d their strings to deck
Your dear, old apoplectic neck.
Sock and buskin—out upon them!
Let the crook-back Richards don them:
I remember wearing socks
That gave severer tragic shocks;
That won a fame by no means fickle—
A fame I stood no chance to lose;
When I acted “Little Pickle”
Stamping in red shoes.

Mentors dubb’d me “stupid child,”
Idle, careless, rude, and wild;
As they labour’d to instil
Mystic hornpipe and quadrille.
How I used to fling and flout
Through “Ladies’ Chain” to “put them out;”
And took vast pains to “balancez”
In any but the proper way!
Red shoes, red shoes, what heavy raps,
Under the name of “gentle taps,”
Fell on your bright, morocco skins
To punish my provoking sins!
Who cared? Not I. Next moment found
Me where the ball and rope went round;
And sermons, scoldings, slaps, and school,
Were soon immersed in Lethe’s pool.
I’ll own my steps were sometimes pestered,
But nothing left the gall or bruise;
The thorn might wound, but never fester’d,
When I wore red shoes.

The Roman in his sandall’d pride,
Gazing upon the Tiber’s tide,
Ne’er met such glory in his way
As I on some “spring, showery day,”
When splashing through the puddle flood
Into a paradise of mud;
Till some intrusive voice was heard
With startling tone and angry word;
Exclaiming “Mercy! who would choose
Such place to walk—look at your shoes!”
Red shoes, how well ye served to fling
In “Hunt the Slipper’s” fairy ring!
When “blouzed and thump’d” on head and legs,
I fear’d no “Miss Amelia Skeggs;”
But scream’d and shouted, clutch’d and claw’d,
Uncheck’d, unruly, and unawed;
And bounced about like “my man John,”
With one shoe off and one shoe on.
What though a tear might sometimes fall,
And dim the lustre of their hues;
It form’d a rainbow, after all,
Dissolving round red shoes.

Bed shoes, red shoes, ye bore me well
Through ferny copse and greenwood dell;
When I career’d in childhood’s day
“Over the hills and far away.”
Now ye went boldly dashing through
The russet heath still charged with dew;
Now in the orchard ye would be
Climbing the fine, old cherry-tree;
Now ye would tramp the grass about,
To find the scatter’d filberts out;
And now beneath broad boughs ye stopp’d,
To see if plums or pears had dropp’d.
Anon, ye scamper’d hard and fast
After the blue moth flitting past;
Keeping the chase with restless might,
Till quickset barrier check’d your flight.
Red shoes, red shoes, ye come in dreams,
When fond and busy Fancy teems:
Ye fill Life’s simplest page I own,
But Memory has turn’d it down.
Ye come with “old familiar faces”—
Ye come with all I cared to lose:
I wake—and count the empty places
Since I wore red shoes.

from Poems (1840) by Eliza Cook

This poem predates H. C. Andersen's story, The Red Shoes, but many of the sentiments are similar that I thought I would share this one as a tribute to Andersen's tale. Of course, this poem is more wistful and much more sympathetic to a child who loved her red shoes.

The Guardian: 'Justice and Punishment'

Today's fairy tale booklet (Day 6) at The Guardian is themed 'Justice and Punishment'. You can read more about the seven part series at my previous post.

Justice and punishment in fairytales: Sarah Churchwell looks at the consequences of fairytale sins. Here's an excerpt:

What constitutes transgression changes as much as what constitutes morality. Little Red Riding Hood, in the earliest version, doesn't disobey, she errs, in the most literal sense, wandering away from the path. But in Perrault's tale she isn't warned not to, and so is not punished for heedlessness. She is simply too innocent to know better, and gobbled up by the wolf, without the last-minute rescue by a huntsman to soften the blow for the children listening. The cautionary tale is simple, its lesson clear. The Red Shoes punishes internal transgressions, otherwise known as sins – although Andersen can't tell the difference between venial and mortal sins. But Little Red Riding Hood cautions innocence from the perspective of experience, warning of external dangers. There be wolves. Duly noted.

Today's theme also gives us another four fairy tales to read:

The fairytale of the one-handed murderer by Italo Calvino

The fairytale of Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault, translated by AE Johnson

The fairytale of the Fisherman and Ifrit from the Arabian Nights, translated by Malcom C Lyons

The fairytale of the Red Shoes by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Naomi Lewis

The illustrations for this set are by Tyler Garrison.