Stuart Walton loses himself in the transporting history of the wine dance.
The intoxication in wine has always demanded physical expression. Its transports of consciousness are such that, under their influence, the drinker leaves prosaic everyday reality behind and enters a state of ecstasy, literally “standing outside oneself’.” At critical mass, and taken in festive company, it also prompts the body to step outside itself too, abandoning its ordinary decorum in dance.
It may be that, at the dawn of formal religious ritual, the dancing provoked by wine was a cultural refinement of inebriated staggering, a way of controlling the loss of control. Dancing is the soul’s petition for liberty, corporeal evidence that the rest of life is not lived in freedom. And wine was the means of release.
Festivals that have grown up around winemaking cultures are as numberless as the stars, and many of them incorporate traditional dances, especially at harvest time. What I am particularly interested in here are those dances that are directly, symbolically connected to wine, rather than simply being one of the jubilant behaviours that wine provokes.
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On the Thracian peninsula in antiquity, the deity associated with wine, Zagreus, later to become the Dionysus of Classical Greece, was the centre of a death-and-rebirth cycle. His resurrection was celebrated each year with gorgeous feasting, unbridled drinking, and entrancing dance. In these rituals, the dancing is thought to have mimicked the treading of grapes at harvest, simultaneously a matter of laborious exertion and its outcome in explosive joy.
The question is: which came first? Was the dance a ritualized enactment of the pigeage à pied, or was it, as many paleoanthropologists believe, that the work of stomping the grapes eventually generated a rhythmic dance that could be performed in celebration outside of the fermenting vat? Rhythmic movement is the lubricant of hard labor, but it becomes all the more enjoyable when performed for its own sake, when the extravagant consumption of wine closed the circle that connected viticulture, religious observance, and ecstasy.
Unusually, it was women who led the development of wine dancing in Thrace. Treading the grapes was their job, but not the marginalized drudgery to which patriarchal cultures worldwide have consigned women. The connection between the spirit of place and the rejuvenating power of the vine was expressly a feminine proficiency, a connection that still survives in the horde of women celebrants who attend Dionysus. Euripides’ play The Bacchae portrays the dreadful risk incurred by standing in their way.
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The wine dance as medicinal custom
Not every European wine dance was a means of celebration. The tradition of the tarantella, a frenzied dance originating in southern Italy, may have its roots in Dionysian fury, but appears to have been a specifically medicinal custom. It was popularly believed that the bites of spiders induced mania, the physical expression of which was both symptom and cure. One danced out the venom, shaking it out of palsied limbs, until the body was bathed in the film of perspiration through which it was shed.
To reach the proper level of convulsion, it was traditional to drink a river of wine. Not only did it neutralize and drive out the toxin, but it prompted the afflicted one to that pitch of self-abandon that would animate the most curatively riotous dance. A body weakened by poison, after all, needed a helping hand in the shape of a skinful of wine. There are variant tarantella dance traditions all over southern Italy. Some are danced in pairs, others solo, but they are united by the calisthenic violence of their movements. Liszt’s Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli S162 is about the right manic tempo.
But what happens when wine and physical motion part company?
An order of Sufism that developed in western Anatolia (present-day Turkiye) in the 13th century is a heterodox variant of the Islamic mystical tradition. Under the leadership of Haji Bektash Veli, it would spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, becoming the official creed of the Janissaries, the elite household cavalry of the Ottoman Sultans. The most devout adherents among the Bektashis, known as darviş, were mendicants who wedded themselves to material poverty and spiritual ecstasy, the latter famously produced by a practice of weightless rotating, described by mesmerised western travellers as “whirling.”
The Sama ceremony at which this movement is performed is the means to achieve an out-of-body state, a prayerful unity with God. It once existed alongside the ritual use of wine for the same purpose and, even today, alcohol is not expressly forbidden among Turkish and Albanian Bektashis. Periods of fasting and other kinds of abstinence are mandatory, but the dancing—arms flung up, eyes closed, head a little tilted, skirts rippling out as the body turns and turns—looks like the purest physical approach to communion with the divine. It is what ecstatic bodily movement looks like when it has evolved out of the use of alcohol. Northern Soul dancers of the 1970s pirouetting at the Wigan Casino knew this, as does every child discovering the pleasure of spinning, the universal initation to altered consciousness.
