Like the dancer in the art literature, the hysterical patient is almost always gendered female in the medical literature. Despite statistics of male hysteria and medical developments in the understanding of the sickness, hysteria remains, in the cultural imagination of our society, a feminine sickness, still linked conceptually to the womb from which it gets its name… and still frequently treated as a sexual disorder.
Observed and understood in its resemblance to dance, hysteria can -and should!- very clearly be not only in the background, but actively in a curious and relevant foreground of dance production and reception…