Day 211 - Dance Story

Dance Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

They danced the ‘Dance of Death.’ It was a battle. It was a religion. It was an art form. They spun and twirled and threw themselves back and forth in the crowd. The music was loud. The celebration had been raging for three days straight. Their bodies were moist, the muscles were sore. The drinking had been plentiful and the drugs had been an experience. The dances had begun and the bodies went in motion.

Life on the island stopped. The celebration was all that mattered. For seven days and seven nights, the celebration never stopped. The celebration honored the ancestors. The people remembered where they came from and who had come before. The spirits of the dead supposedly returned to walk amongst the people, to celebrate with them, to dance in revelry. Everyone wore a mask so the dead could hide in plain sight, unexposed. The faceless spirits could watch. The soulless spirits could possess the bodies of the living and rave for one fanciful moment. The dance was for the living and the dance was for the dead. The dance allowed all to become lost and trade places, unaware, unannounced. They intermingled in a grotesque orgy of despair and loss.

The jungle was dark and the music was loud. Island inhabitants were wise and stayed in the fire-lit village. Visitors sometimes wandered off, inebriated, into the jungle. Many of them were never heard from again. Or so the legends went. The fire and the music were supposed to keep the evil forces away. The dancing was supposed to keep evil spirits occupied.

There was an art to the ‘Dance of Death,’ even if the casual observer couldn’t tell. It looked like a flow of constant motion. Men with knives attached to their wrists and feet. Women with blades positioned between their fingers and toes. In some way the dance looked like simulated combat. The men and women swung and charged each other. They took turns attacking and defending. One wrong move and a dancer could end up dead.

There was a passion and a love to the dance. The dance reminded the people of their own mortality, but in that reminder, they were to realize that life must be lived and love fulfilled. The dancers attacked and killed and many of the actors felt as if their lives really had ceased. The remaining dancers embraced and celebrated their life through lust.

The nights were full of perpetual food and drink and intercourse. All vices and satisfactions were on public display. There was no shame. Only the fight against death.

The dead were honored and the dead were given a chance to return and experience joy once more. For seven days they had life again. For seven days they had their indulgences and their pleasures and bodies to use as they saw fit. For seven days.

On the seventh night, the drinking stopped at sunset as the moods began to change. The seventh night was for mourning and sorrow and for the lamenting of regrets. The living showed grief while the dead felt the failures and suffered the pain of death once again. The dancing slowed and lost its frantic desperate energy. The dancing became slow and moody and remorseful and a reminder of that which is painful in life. And then as the sun rose on the eighth day, any remaining alcohol was poured out, food was thrown away, the dancing stopped and the people fasted and repented, and the dead were returned to where they belonged, their graves.