Gareth Brookes

Set in 1518, and told from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of the witnesses,The Dancing Plaguetells the true story of when hundreds of Strasbourgs inhabitants were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance. 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 utterly unique mixed-media style Gareth Brookes has devised to tell it. The pioneering blend of his trademark pyrographic technique with sumptuously colorfuland literalembroidery perfectly reflects, in a beautiful work of art, the enduring fragility of our human conditionfrom choreomania to coronavirus.