CHOREOMANIA
Music by Julia Meinwald
Book and Lyrics by Gordon Leary

In early July, 1518, Frau Troffea walked out onto the streets of Strasbourg and began to dance uncontrollably.  She stopped when she collapsed from exhaustion, only to start again a few hours later.  Within a week, three dozens dancers had mysteriously joined her.  Within a month, there were four hundred people dancing uncontrollably in the streets.  The people of Strasbourg tried everything they could think of to stop the dancers – hiring musicians to encourage dancing, taking dancers to the shrines of St. Vitus – until it all stopped one day in September.  Choreomania examines the lengths we go to try to explain the unexplainable.