The Red Shoes:
Planetary Pathological Choreography
Coco Zhenqi Guo 2025
"A biological analyst, reassigned from the core laboratory zone due to pregnancy, has been relegated to organizing data and archival records. One day, while sorting through abandoned sample logs, she discovers a striking similarity between an ergot strain from 1518 and microscopic particles found in the Kerala red rain of 2001, and begins conducting unauthorized deeper research. With each sample she secretly analyzes, the laboratory temperature rises anomalously, and researchers and staff in the same zone begin making involuntary subtle movements, progressing from allergy-like itching to minor everyday gestures, gradually losing control and breaking into dance.
Though she herself shows no such movements, the frequency of her unborn child's fetal kicks is steadily increasing. Yet even knowing that the closer she gets to the truth, the more uncanny and intense the fetal movement becomes, her body seems cursed, unable to stop the compulsion to continue researching. When she finally observes samples from both eras simultaneously under the microscope, thunder and lightning erupt outside the laboratory, while the radio inside begins playing an unsettling medieval dance tune.
In an era increasingly understood as the "pathological Anthropocene," pollution and leakage are no longer merely accidents to be controlled but have become entry points into a new ontological possibility. This speculative theater unfolds in a seemingly impossible location: the laboratory, a space obsessed with maintaining sterility, has paradoxically become the microscopic stage for planetary pathology.
Here, the ergot strain appears in a spectral guise, entangling two mysterious events across time and space. In 1518 Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea suddenly began dancing in the street, her body moving uncontrollably and continuously. This abnormal dancing state spread like a plague; within a matter of weeks, more than 400 people had joined this involuntary collective choreography. They danced until utterly exhausted, and some even died as a result. Among the explanations proposed by later researchers, the most widely recognized is "ergot poisoning": this fungus that parasitizes rye contains alkaloids capable of inducing hallucinations and muscle spasms. Yet this explanation struggles to fully account for the scale and duration of the phenomenon, let alone explain why an entire city fell into this collective "dance infection."
Nearly five centuries later, in Kerala in 2001, another phenomenon appeared that defied easy classification. Two months of red rainfall stained the city the color of blood; this strange liquid seeped into the soil and merged with the local elemental cycle. Even more baffling were the mysterious particles found in the rainwater: they exhibited characteristics of life, surviving and self-replicating at extreme temperatures between 90 and 300 degrees Celsius, yet contained no known DNA structure. This existence situated between life and non-life remains a scientific enigma to this day.
These two temporal ruptures, both escaping scientific explanation, are woven together in the laboratory through the observations of a pregnant researcher. Under her microscope, past and present, fungus and rainwater, are braided into a delicate and dangerous network of toxicity.
I. The Dancing Plague: Fissures in Knowledge Classification and the Crisis of Bodily Definition
When we call the collective frenzy of 1518 Strasbourg a "dance" plague, the naming itself contains a fundamental question: what kind of bodily movement can be defined as dance?
In the medieval context, dance was often associated with strict social etiquette, religious ritual, or folk celebration, a codified and regulated bodily practice. Yet the physical state exhibited by Frau Troffea and the more than 400 residents who followed her followed no specific choreography and belonged to no known dance form. This bodily movement, situated between volition and loss of control, challenged both the contemporary and current basic definitions of "dance."
This uncontrolled, involuntary collective dancing, in some respects, foreshadowed the reimagination of the body that accompanied the rise of modern dance at the end of the nineteenth century: the rejection of established form, the emphasis on spontaneous movement, the valorization of bodily instinct. Yet unlike the liberation sought by modern dance, the body in the dancing plague was a contradictory existence: simultaneously a body manipulated by some force, and through that manipulation, a site revealing possibilities that exceeded ordinary social norms.
At the level of knowledge classification, the dancing plague created a unique predicament. The medical perspective sought to attribute it to ergot poisoning; psychology tended to explain it as collective hysteria; sociology treated it as a collective response to social crisis; while dance scholarship struggled to incorporate it into any conventional dance category. This phenomenon consistently overflows all single explanatory frameworks, displaying a more complex mode of existence: simultaneously symptom and performance, pathology and art, individual loss of control and collective resonance. This ontological ambiguity not only challenges the classificatory frameworks of modern knowledge systems but also questions our foundational understanding of bodily expression, subjectivity, and control.
II. Ergot as Trans-species Choreographer: The Choreographic Force of Matter and the Illusion of Laboratory Control
If ergot poisoning was one of the causes that triggered the dancing plague, then this "dance theater" spanning five centuries reveals a choreographic possibility that exceeds anthropocentrism. This is no longer a dance choreographed by humans to express human will, but a contagious bodily movement induced by matter itself, surpassing human intention and control. The ergot fungus, through its alkaloid components, weaves a collective choreography that crosses species, one in which the human body is merely one among many participants in this material choreography.
The manifestation of this nonhuman choreographic force challenges our understanding of dance's essential nature. Perhaps dance has never been a purely human art form, but rather a far more complex entanglement of matter and body. Contemporary dancers often emphasize dialogue with gravity, space, and material in their creative process, while the dancing plague goes further still to reveal: our bodies are always already caught within the choreography of various nonhuman forces and have never truly "belonged" to us.
In many non-Western cultural traditions, this choreographic force of matter carries a far deeper understanding. Plants are regarded as possessing their own distinctive spirituality and agency, capable of transmitting knowledge and wisdom by altering human states of consciousness. Ergot fungus, a substance capable of inducing "madness," is classified as a "toxin" within the Western rational tradition, but in other cultural contexts might be understood as a medium transmitting information. This alternative understanding of the plant-human relationship, in some sense, overturns the suppression of material agency by modern science.
This recognition gains new illumination in the context of the contemporary laboratory. When the researcher attempts to observe through the microscope the connection between the 1518 ergot sample and the 2001 red rain sample, the relationship between controller and controlled begins to undergo a subtle inversion. Within this space that strives to maintain rational control, the ergot strain displays a distinctive material affect: it influences the human body not only through chemical action, but more importantly, creates a kind of collective emotional atmosphere. This affect is not individual subjective feeling but a pre-individual intensity, a material force capable of crossing the boundaries between individuals.
Precision instruments and rigorous observation protocols should ensure complete mastery over matter, yet during the observation process, the researchers' bodies begin involuntarily responding to these materials. When the laboratory members fall into collective dance, they are not merely experiencing physiological reactions but are being drawn into a larger material-affective arrangement. This reversal exposes a fundamental paradox in scientific observation: we attempt to control and understand matter through technological means, yet matter itself always "gazes back" at and influences us in its own particular way.
In this microscopic theater of the laboratory, the ergot strain is no longer a passive object of observation but a choreographer possessing its own complexity and agency. It influences the observer's body through its own materiality, challenging the taken-for-granted subject-object division of the laboratory. This situation echoes in some measure the bodily state of the dancing plague: in both cases, the human body reveals its essentially porous and permeable nature, both undergoing a material choreography that exceeds human will.
III. Technology and Nonhuman Time: Multiple Temporalities in the Laboratory
In this microscopic field of the laboratory, Latourian paradoxes constantly unfold: when the researcher simultaneously observes samples from 1518 and 2001, this very "simultaneity" is itself an illusion created by technology. Laboratory instruments attempt to compress matter from different times and spaces into a single moment of observation, reducing five centuries of material transformation into comparable data. Yet this technological compression of time itself contains a kind of violence: it ignores the temporality of matter itself, ignoring that each sample carries historical dimensions that no instrument can fully capture.
Within the laboratory, at least four distinct temporalities coexist: the instrument measurement time precise to the second, the historical time frozen within the samples, the generative maternal time of the pregnant researcher, and the time of collective pathological transformation induced by toxicity. These temporalities do not simply coexist but mutually interfere and permeate one another. When the researcher observes through the microscope, she must contend not only with the standardized temporal demands of the instruments, but also with the physiological rhythms of the fetus within her, while simultaneously enduring the temporal disorientation induced by the ergot toxin.
Particularly noteworthy is the phenomenon of "delay" within the laboratory. With each sample analyzed, there is a lag before the temperature rises and the bodily responses appear. This delay is not a technical defect but reveals a fundamental problem: perhaps different materials and different life forms each possess their own temporal rhythms, while technological observation always attempts to unify these heterogeneous temporalities into some standardized framework. Yet, as the collective dance within the laboratory demonstrates, the temporality inherent to matter itself always finds some way to escape and exceed such frameworks.
When laboratory members involuntarily begin to dance, this collective temporal disorientation reveals another dimension: perhaps true "simultaneity" does not exist, and what we call "the present moment" is always constituted by multiple temporalities. The researchers believe they are observing historical samples, but it may actually be history that is "observing" the present through these samples; they believe they are controlling the sequence of observation, but may actually be caught up in some larger temporal arrangement.
These multiple temporalities continuously manifest throughout the experimental process: instrument time readings, rates of change in chemical reactions, the physiological rhythms of the body, and those changes of state that cannot be precisely measured, such as the increasing viscosity of the air and the sudden playing of a medieval dance tune. This suggests: any seemingly precise scientific observation inevitably involves the interweaving of multiple temporal scales. When we say an experiment "succeeds," in which temporal dimension exactly is that success being measured?
Even more striking is the way in which causal relationships within the laboratory seem to grow blurred: did the rise in temperature cause the collective dance, or did some collective transformation trigger the temperature rise? Did the act of observation provoke the sample's reaction, or was the sample itself waiting for a particular moment of observation? This blurring of causality is not a failure of observation but rather reveals a deeper truth: in a site like the laboratory, observer and observed, past and present, technological time and material time, are all caught within a complex relationship of mutual constitution.
IV. The Body Out of Control: The Collapse of Labor Classification
Within the laboratory, that paradigmatic site of intellectual labor, when the researcher's body begins involuntarily dancing, a deeply entrenched system of labor classification begins to dissolve. Traditionally, laboratory researchers have been regarded as representatives of rationality, controlling and understanding the material world through rigorous intellectual labor; dancers have been classified as bodily laborers, creating art through conscious physical expression; while patients who lose consciousness are often regarded as "useless" bodies that have temporarily lost their capacity to labor. Yet in this collective choreography triggered by the ergot strain, these boundaries begin to blur.
The researchers' bodies suddenly lose control during the experimental process, their precise observational movements transformed into involuntary dance. This transformation not only challenges the division between intellectual and physical labor but also reveals the suppressed bodily dimension present within all labor. Every precise movement in the laboratory is, in its essential nature, a form of bodily choreography, one that is usually concealed beneath a rational exterior. At the same time, those seemingly uncontrolled dancing movements disclose a certain wisdom of bodily instinct.
The dancing plague of 1518 occurred primarily among the working class, while contemporary laboratory researchers are typically regarded as representatives of the knowledge class. Yet in the process of toxic choreography, three states that have been assigned vastly different values and powers in contemporary society, namely the rational observer, the professional performer, and the unconscious patient, interpenetrate one another. The researcher is simultaneously observer and observed, controller and the one losing control, engaged in both professional labor and involuntary performance. This multiplicity challenges our understanding of professionalism, rationality, and control. Within capitalism's system of labor classification, whose body is truly "useful"? Whose loss of control is permitted? Whose labor is recognized? Which movements can be capitalized? This material choreography within the laboratory, in some sense, deconstructs this hierarchical system of labor value.
V. The Dance That Never Stops: From The Red Shoes to Technological Addiction
In Andersen's fairy tale "The Red Shoes," even after Karen's feet are severed, the red shoes continue to dance tirelessly, and even the severed feet cannot stop moving. This unsettling image prefigures a systemic compulsion that exceeds individual will: even as the individual collapses and dies, capital's machine of exploitation continues to operate. In the contemporary context, this irresistible force manifests across multiple registers: the instrumentalized body of the dancer is continuously worn down by endless training and performance; the laboratory researcher's energy is depleted under the pressure of compulsive knowledge production; while the digital laborer is gently yet continuously hollowed out within the attention economy.
Though the pregnant researcher in the laboratory does not join her colleagues' involuntary dance, her body has equally fallen into a state from which it cannot stop: knowing full well that with each sample she analyzes, not only will the laboratory temperature rise abnormally, and colleagues will progress from itching to subtle movements and then to involuntary dancing, but the fetus in her womb will also respond with violent agitation, she is still unable to stop the compulsion to continue researching. This state of "being unable to stop" reflects a particular psychophysiological syndrome within the contemporary system of production: the confrontation between the compulsive desire to produce and the limits of the body, the complicity between inner drive and self-exploitation.
Like those empty shoes that continue to dance, the contemporary system of exploitation reveals an almost material autonomous existence: it does not depend on any particular individual but continues to operate as a self-sustaining system. A dancer's career comes to an abrupt halt when the body reaches its limit, yet the stage is never left empty; a laboratory researcher may suddenly die under pressure, yet the demands for academic output never diminish; when one digital laborer is exhausted, new bodies are immediately incorporated into this never-resting system.
This compulsive, continuous labor presents itself in the digital age as a new clinical phenomenon: the fragmentation of attention and dopamine-driven behavioral patterns mutually reinforce each other, forming a self-sustaining neurotransmitter feedback loop. Algorithm-driven information flows, through precisely designed intermittent reward mechanisms, manufacture a state of persistent cognitive demand. This state bears a striking resemblance to the compulsive movement of the 1518 dancing plague: the body is driven by some invisible force, oscillating between exhaustion and agitation.
Even more noteworthy is the biopolitical mechanism underlying this digital dependency. The contemporary attention economy quantifies fundamental human cognitive processes into computable data units, capturing, segmenting, and monetizing attention through complex algorithmic systems. This new form of biopolitical control is far more refined than the physical exploitation of the industrial era: by manufacturing a persistent sense of cognitive scarcity and dopamine fluctuation, it transforms physiological dependence into economic value. In this sense, we have all become "Karen" in some measure: even when conscious of the system's harm and attempting to escape, the force that propels us to continuously produce, perform, and consume follows us like a shadow.
VI. The Hidden Body: Fetal Movement as a Form of Dance
Within this material choreography crossing time and space, the presence of the pregnant researcher points toward another perceptual dimension. If the collective dance of the laboratory members displays a visible bodily movement, then between mother and fetus an even more subtle choreography is being performed, one that exceeds the visual. Within the unique space of the uterus, touch replaces sight as the dominant mode of perception: mother and fetus sense each other's existence through continuous mutual touching rather than looking. This haptic communication challenges the traditional separation of subject and object, and also questions our visually centered definition of "dance."
The existence of the fetus is itself a distinctive state of in-betweenness. It is simultaneously an independent life and dependent on the maternal body, simultaneously subject and object, simultaneously autonomous and parasitic. Can fetal movement be called dance? This question itself challenges our understanding of the subjectivity of dance. When we say "the pregnant researcher did not join the collective dance," do we overlook another form of dance occurring within her? Is this the stillness of one person, or a pas de deux between two lives?
The uterus, a space long ignored and exploited by patriarchal systems, actually offers an entirely different mode of perception. Within this space, sight yields to touch, control yields to symbiosis, and boundaries become blurred and permeable. This state, in some measure, reflects our relationship with the environment: just as the residents of Kerala were already living within the air and vapor that would soon turn red before the red rain descended, we all live in an environment full of unknown permeations. The uterus as an overlooked "space of dance" may be a crucial metaphor for understanding this permeable mode of existence.
Her body must not only coexist with the ergot toxin but also maintain the symbiotic relationship with the fetus, and this very multiplicity happens to mirror the longstanding complex connection between ergot and female bodily autonomy. In the medieval period, ergot was simultaneously a potentially lethal toxin and an important medicine used by midwives to alleviate labor pain and control postpartum hemorrhage. This knowledge, situated between healing and danger, formed a critical component of women's medical practice.
Yet the possession of this knowledge also became an important charge in medieval witch trials. Those midwives and herbalists who understood the proper dosing of ergot were among the primary groups accused of witchcraft. Behind these accusations lay the reflection of patriarchy's fear of and suppression toward women's bodily knowledge: when women began to master methods of influencing their own bodies, when they gained some degree of reproductive autonomy, this autonomy was regarded as a threat to social order.
In the laboratory, the pregnant researcher's "stillness" forms a contrast with her colleagues' frenzied dancing, yet this surface "exemption" conceals a deeper resonance: the violent movements of the fetus within her seem to be responding to some forgotten history. These fetal movements are not merely a physiological response to the ergot toxin but more closely resemble a kind of bodily memory of the women's medical knowledge that has been silenced throughout history.
VII. The Bleeding Sky: Global Meteorological Control and Gender Politics
If the European witch trials represent a form of overt violence, then the contemporary militarized management of the atmosphere and hydrology embodies a more systemic form of control. Meteorological science has been inseparable from military purpose since its inception: from wartime weather forecasting during World War II to Cold War weather modification programs and today's climate engineering, weather has always been regarded as an object to be predicted, controlled, and weaponized. This desire for control carries a profound connection to patriarchy's anxiety toward an "uncontrolled nature."
In this context, the phenomenon of the 2001 Kerala red rain presents a powerful historical metaphor. When the red rainfall stained streets and buildings, this spectacle in some measure reenacted two forms of historical violence: the flames of medieval witch burnings, and the fate of countless female infants drowned at birth. In Indian culture, women's menstrual blood has long been regarded as a symbol of "pollution," something to be hidden and purified. When this stigmatized red color suddenly descended from the sky, suffusing the entire urban space, it seemed to be confronting people in an unavoidable way with that repressed history: the "witches" who were hunted, the female infants who were drowned, the female bodies that were stigmatized.
At a deeper level, the managerial logic of the global meteorological control system over nature shares a structural resemblance with these historical violences. If witch trials achieved control through the violent elimination of women's bodies and knowledge, then the contemporary meteorological system attempts to domesticate "uncontrolled" natural forces through technological means. Both reflect a deep-seated patriarchal logic: treating uncontrollable forces, whether women's knowledge, women's bodies, or natural phenomena, as objects that must be conquered and purified.
When the spectacle of the red rain overlaps with these historical memories, it reveals an unsettling truth: modern society's technological control over nature, in some measure, continues the logic of ancient gendered violence. Those red particles descending from the sky are like historical ghosts, reminding us that the violence that has been forgotten has never truly disappeared but has merely assumed more concealed and systemic forms.
VIII. The Politics of Color: The Rebellion of Elements
In the elemental politics of modernity, the color coding of natural elements embodies a specific epistemological hegemony. The encoding of water as blue is not merely a visual tradition but a microcosm of the entire modern technoscientific governance system: meteorological radar transforms precipitation into blue data images, hydrological monitoring uses blue as an indicator of purity, and urban planning marks water supply systems with blue lines. Behind this color standardization lies an entire set of technical frameworks that rationalize and render calculable the elements of nature. Through this encoding, water is transformed into a technical object that can be quantified, predicted, and controlled.
When the red rainfall descended in Kerala in 2001, it not only shattered the standard color spectrum of meteorological observation but also exposed the biases within elemental taxonomy: why must water be blue? Why are "abnormal" colors always classified as pollution or threat? This tendency to associate particular colors with "purity," "normality," and "safety" exposes a kind of colonialist logic within technological governance.
Particularly noteworthy is the intrinsic connection between color standardization and technological control. Modern meteorological systems transform precipitation into standardized blue data, enabling it to be incorporated into global weather prediction models; water quality monitoring quantifies purity as a blue index to facilitate cross-regional comparison and management. This standardization serves not only scientific cognition but is also a mechanism of power: by establishing a unified visual language, it enables natural elements to be incorporated into a global system of technological management.
Yet the 2001 Kerala red rain challenged this standardization system across multiple registers. First was the rupture at the visual level: the blood-red precipitation shattered the standard color spectrum of meteorological observation. The more fundamental challenge came from the mysterious particles in the rainwater: they displayed cellular morphological structures and boundaries, hinting at the existence of some form of biological organization; they survived within an extreme temperature range of 90 to 300 degrees Celsius, a heat tolerance far exceeding that of most known life forms on Earth; and most controversially, these particles appeared capable of some form of self-replication, yet tested negative in standard DNA detection.
This double "abnormality," namely non-standard color and an unclassifiable life form, reveals a fundamental paradox within systems of technological control: we establish refined classification systems and standardized frameworks, attempting to bring natural phenomena within a controllable cognitive range, yet nature always seems to escape and exceed these frameworks in some way. The red rain brought not only visual disruption at the level of color; more importantly, through particles that do not follow known laws of life, it challenged, at the ontological level, humanity's desire to classify. If they have no DNA as hereditary material, how do they achieve self-replication? If they are indeed alive, what kind of information storage and transmission system do they employ? Does the existence of beings that cannot be fully understood within existing scientific frameworks suggest some more radical possibility: that perhaps nature itself cannot be fully incorporated into human systems of cognition and control?
IX. Queer Hydrology: Pollution as Transformation
"Pollution" and "dyeing" carry special political significance within queer theory. When the red rainfall stained the city's infrastructure and residents' everyday objects, this process of "pollution" mapped onto the history of queer communities being long regarded as society's "source of pollution." During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, "contaminated blood" became a central rhetoric directed at queer communities: public swimming pools were seen as potential sites of infection, contact with bodily fluids became a source of panic, and the distinction between "clean" heterosexual blood and "polluted" homosexual blood constructed a new biopolitical classification system.
In the history of public health, the association of "blood contamination" with queer identity produced far-reaching institutional effects. Many countries still restrict gay men from donating blood, a policy whose persistence reflects a deep-seated imagination of "pollution." Yet queer nightclub culture's blood-bathing parties constitute a complex response to this history of stigmatization: by dramatizing and ritualizing "pollution," queer communities have redefined the political meaning of "impurity." Just as the particles in the red rain that do not follow conventional definitions of life offer another way of thinking about "pollution": perhaps "purity" itself is a concept that needs to be questioned. When red particles of unknown origin transform the rainwater, this transformation of color is both material and symbolic: "dyeing" implies a process of mutual permeation and transformation, a disruption of the established order, pointing toward an affirmative political strategy of gender.
X. Toxic Intimacy and Planetary Pathological Choreography
In the "pathological Anthropocene," pathological transformation is no longer merely a threat to be eliminated but has become a new ontological possibility. When the ergot strain traverses five centuries of time and space to reach the laboratory, when red rainfall stains the city's streets, these "pollutions" in some measure herald a new mode of planetary relation. Within the laboratory, that space obsessed with maintaining sterility, toxicity has paradoxically created a distinctive form of intimacy: through the shared experience of "being poisoned," the researchers have formed a kind of collective bond that exceeds rational control. This bond is no longer built upon rational choices between autonomous individuals but originates from shared vulnerability.
When thunder rumbles outside the laboratory, this seemingly localized choreography of pathological transformation suddenly acquires a planetary dimension. This is not merely a collective dance occurring within an enclosed space but the microscopic manifestation of a larger-scale planetary pathology. The ergot strain, the red rain, the collective dance: these phenomena, superficially unrelated, may actually all be different symptoms of the same planetary pathological transformation. In this sense, the rising temperature, the thickening air, and the loss of bodily control within the laboratory are not merely local phenomena but a microcosm of the systemic transformation the entire planet is undergoing.
And when the medieval dance tune suddenly sounds, some suppressed history returns in the form of sound waves. This sound is not only a historical echo but a material transmission: the memory of the 1518 dancing plague was preserved in the molecular structure of the ergot strain, reactivated within the material substrate of the 2001 red rain, and finally released within the enclosed space of the laboratory. This material memory crossing time and space suggests: perhaps the planet itself is a vast memory storage system, and what we call "pollution" is, in some measure, also a form of this planetary memory making itself manifest.
Then how does the planet choreograph? What kinds of forces arrange the material flows, energy exchanges, and life rhythms at global scale? Do phenomena as superficially unrelated as the ergot strain, the red rain, and collective dance hint at some planetary choreographic logic we have yet to understand? More importantly, within this planetary choreography, humanity is simultaneously participant and frequent aspirant to the role of choreographer; how is this contradictory dual identity possible? The dancing plague of 1518, the red rain of 2001, the collective dance of the present: do these movements across different times and spaces follow some common rhythm? If choreography is always concerned with the organization of time and space, then what kind of spatiotemporal logic governs this planetary choreography spanning five centuries? These questions point toward a new ontology of dance: perhaps dance has never been a purely human art form, but has always involved a larger planetary arrangement.