HAMSTERs

Epidemics of dance were one of the most mysterious plagues in medieval Europe. Historians disagree about what caused them: food poisoned with toxins, religious highs, or perhaps it was mass hysteria caused by long-term stress and the fear of hunger, war, or the Black Death. When Satan ordered people to dance, entire villages and towns fell into trances lasting a few days or weeks. The last epidemic of dance in Brussels took place in the 16th century, that is until a terrorist attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014. Witnesses and neighborhood residents fell under a collective hypnosis: they went out into the street and could not stop dancing. This did not really happen, of course: it was just part of the social and artistic experiment underlying Hamsters. In this performance-art film, the director examines the concept of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Brian Jenkins, a researcher on terrorist movements, argues that terrorism is theater-it develops like a play and has to have an audience. Doyen reverses this assertion: theater can be terrorism, and a mass happening on the street is a takeover of a public space.