The Danse Macabre was a medieval literary and pictorial depiction of a procession or dance of figures living and dead, expressing the universal equalizing power of death. There is a danse macabre at the finale of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Danse macabre imagery also appears in Walt Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony short The Skeleton Dance and at least two Mickey Mouse cartoons. The most macabre, of course, have been played out onstage.
Filippo Taglioni’s ballet La révolte des femmes premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1833. The story of an uprising by a community of female slaves against a sultan was adapted, with a new title, for the British audience a year later. The Revolt of the Harem premiered at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, London, and became an immediate scandal because of two very controversial sections: a bathing scene in the second act that contained female nudity and, in act 3, an even more shocking tableau in which women donned men’s soldier uniforms and executed military maneuvers. Revealing the feminine form and assuming the form of a male were equally effective in generating ticket sales.
The bathing scene was ultimately a disappointment to men who were willing to be dragged to the ballet on the chance of seeing some female flesh. The dancers were covered in so many layers of gauzy fabric and crowded in such a way that no nakedness was on display at all. Yet this fantasy of domestic revolt and feminine solidarity captured the imagination of the audience’s better half. This was the first ballet to deal with the emancipation of women, and at a time when women were exploited in the workplace and often abused at home, The Revolt of the Harem not only was a sensation but also soon represented a cause. The ballet was even credited with inspiring social reform in the United Kingdom, including the 1839 Custody of Infants Act, which permitted mothers to petition for custody of their young children, a right that was not assumed previously.
So when the work was revived at the same Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in 1844, it was already a favorite. This revival would turn out to be as memorable, historic, and traumatic to those in the audience as was the original a decade earlier, only for a very different reason.
The performance in question occurred on the evening of Saturday, December 14, during the controversial bathing scene in act 2. The dancers gathered and sprinkled water on one another, their graceful figures swathed in muslin and illuminated by gas lamps throwing light upward from their placement slightly below the stage.
Clara Webster, in the role of Zelika, a royal slave, entered the scene. She was a British girl and a favorite with London audiences. Not at all like the intense foreign ballerinas who visited the London stage, Clara was short, but described as “extremely airy and delicately proportioned.” She had a light complexion and expressive, round face. Her style of dancing was described as “remarkable for its neatness, elegance, and finish.”
Clara swept across the stage in her filmy gown, splashing water on the other slave girls, who also moved about gracefully. While men craned to see how much of Clara’s body they might yet get to see, she stepped into a bath.
As she did, her muslin dress caught the flame of a gas lamp. A London newspaper reported what happened next:
Feeling the fire, she sprang and rushed upon the stage. The motion fanned the flame, and almost in an instant the whole of the slight and inflammable material of her dress was a mass of fire. With piercing shrieks she sought for safety among her companions on the stage. For a moment they surrounded her; but the frightful spectacle the unhappy girl presented made them shrink from the contact with her. It was fortunate they did so, as nothing could have prevented their own dresses catching fire; and the consequences would have been indescribably terrible.
It happened so quickly it could have been a stage illusion. The audience watched in bewilderment, then horror. Many women in the theater screamed. As soon as Clara ran to the wings, a carpenter grabbed her. He threw her to the floor and managed to extinguish the flames, burning himself in the process.
Clara’s mother was in the house that evening. She was one of the first at Clara’s side. “My child,” she said. “If I had but been in the wings, I could have saved you with my cloak.”
Clara managed to whisper a reply. “Yes . . . mama . . . you could.” Her face, neck, arms, and bosom were burned and blistered. Artificial flowers were burned into her hair. They took Clara Webster to her apartment in Regent’s Park, where two doctors were called in.
Back at the Theatre Royal, there was a slight delay before W. H. Payne, the master pantomime clown, stepped onstage. He told the audience that Clara Webster had only been injured slightly, and that the ballet would proceed. The following morning, the stage manager wrote a letter to the newspapers, saying that Clara was out of danger and that there would be a benefit performance for her the following Monday.
The stage manager was overly optimistic. Clara was burned quite severely, and she died from those burns at 2:00 AM on Tuesday, December 17. She was twenty-three.
At the inquest two days after her death, the coroner told the jury why and how Clara Webster’s death could have been avoided. Thomas Wakley was a celebrated surgeon, founder of the medical journal the Lancet, and a social reformer. With a patch of muslin and a flame, he demonstrated how Clara’s and other costumes could easily be made flameproof with a preparation of muriate of ammonia. He also recommended that wire screens be placed over the stage gas lamps to keep the flames in check. The jury agreed that proper safety precautions were not taken. They declared Clara Webster’s death to be accidental.
Clara’s accident got a lot of press. All the London papers reported her death, as well as the announcement that The Revolt of the Harem was closing and would not be presented in public again. Despite that promise, the ballet opened in London four years later at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, only under a new name. The Revolt of the Harem was now The Battle of the Amazons. The characters had new names, and there were changes in scenes. But the plot remained the same, and each night the stage was filled with female warriors.
Yoshiyuki Takada specialized in butoh, a form of Japanese dance that rejects traditional, Western dance forms and allows the body to express itself in an organic, natural way. Butoh performers commonly wear white rice flour body makeup and use slow, hypercontrolled motions. Takada and his five-man butoh troupe, Sankai Juku, went a step beyond. They performed their dances high in the sky, hanging off the sides of tall buildings.
The Tokyo-based Sankai Juku boys made their American debut at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984. As they did often when they arrived in a new city, the dancers opened their residency with a thirty-minute “dance of life and death” titled Jomon sho (“Homage to Prehistory”). The dance was performed on the outside of the Los Angeles Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Their bodies shaved of hair and painted white, with touches of red at their fingertips, the performers were suspended upside down by ropes attached to their ankles. They began in the fetal position and slowly writhed, undulated, and reached out while being lowered to the ground.
“Our main theme is life and death, so we try to realize the situation of death and the state of just being born,” Takada told the Los Angeles Times. “When we are born, we first realize the situation of death. The mind is nothing, just like the body. That’s why we are white and we shave our bodies—to be nothing.”
When Sankai Juku arrived in Seattle to launch their second United States tour in September 1985, they were really something! They’d gotten permission to perform their life-and-death dance on the side of the Mutual Life Building, a historic six-story structure on the corner of First and Yesler, in the Pioneer Square neighborhood downtown. Their team spent days building a scaffold atop the Yesler Way side of the building and handing out yellow photocopies advertising the September 10 lunchtime performance.
By noon that day, when Ushio Amagatsu appeared on the building’s roof and blew on a conch shell, hundreds of people had gathered below. The crowd went silent at the sight of four men, hairless, nearly naked, and powdered white, inching out over the platform and swinging out over the side. They hung in the fetal position, their feet in the air, backs to the pavement below.
Within a minute or so, Yoshiyuki Takada began to spin slowly, and his rope began to twist. This was not part of the show. His rope was unraveling. He reached up and attempted to grab the rope above the section that was fraying—but it was too late. The rope snapped. Takada plunged eighty feet toward the ground.
People in the crowd screamed, but Takada didn’t utter a sound. He remained in the fetal position all the way down, and when he smashed into the sidewalk, the impact sent up a puff of white rice flour. Then there was silence.
A doctor was sitting on the sidewalk only ten feet from where Takada hit. He rushed over and began administering CPR. A woman from the crowd helped, but they couldn’t get the dancer to breathe on his own. When the ambulance arrived, the two of them walked away, according to one account, “their hands and faces white with powder.”
Yoshiyuki Takada had suffered compound fractures of the left elbow and shoulder and, most crucially, severe head trauma. He was declared dead at Harborview Medical Center twenty-four minutes after the blowing of the conch shell. He was thirty-one.
That night, the sidewalk on Yesler Way was filled with candles, flowers, and messages. One note, written on a napkin, read, “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen before he fell and after, I was lost.”
After the accident, and before an autopsy was performed, the surviving Sankai Juku dancers performed a ritual cleansing of Takada’s body. His parents were notified, and they traveled from Japan to take his body back for burial. It was later determined that Takada’s rope wasn’t strong enough to hold his weight. All four ropes used in the spectacle were supposed to be tested with sandbags, but because the risk had become so routine, three of them, including Takada’s, were not.