Gareth has been a visiting lecturer at Wimbledon School of Art, the University of York St Johns, Staffordshire University and The Royal College of Art. He runs regular workshops in embroidery, printmaking, comic and zine making, most recently running workshops in embroidery at Bradford Literary Festival and in monoprint printmaking (with Islington Centre for Refugees and Migrants) at The ICA, London. He also organises the South London Comic and Zine Fair, an annual book fair featuring small press publishers and artists, which encourages new artists to exhibit their work. Gareth has produced a number of self-published books, including The Land of My Heart Chokes on Its Abundance. His work is also published by collectives such as The Alternative Press and The Comix Reader, while his two-comic collaboration with artist Steve Tillotson, Manly Boys and Comely Girls, is available from Avery Hill Publishing. The Dancing Plague tells a true story, from 1518, when hundreds of inhabitants of Strasbourg were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance, from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of its witnesses. Prone to mystic visions as a child, betrayed in the convent to which she flees, then abused by her loutish husband, Mary endures her life as an oppressed and ultimately scapegoated woman with courage, strength, and inspiring beauty. Such ineffective prayer could also lead to the eternal war between heaven and hell becoming unbalanced. Saints (such as St Vitus, who was seen as responsible for dancing plagues) might give permission for devils to run amok. So, when the clergy were seen to be misbehaving and engaging in corruption, people feared for their souls and saw danger everywhere.

Brookes’s sepia images retelling the story is anything but a mere comic-strip account. Colour is only introduced to depict the devilish conductors of this manic infection, and the book visually captures much of what must have been the everyday reality of the time — the corruption of the monastic scene, the underlying resentments of a class oppressed by a feudal nobility, the family tensions in male chauvinist households and, above all, the fear and cruelty of a world that may after all not have changed so much.

Customer reviews

Breakwater by Katriona Chapman. It's a really beautifully drawn and involving read about dealing with self-destructive behaviour. It doesn't offer easy answers and stays with you a long time after you close the book. If it seems remarkable that multiple historical figures would inform a single character, consider that the outbreak of dancing that took place in Strasbourg was not, as one might expect, a singular incident… even in Strasbourg. Professor Bale notes in the introduction that similar dancing outbreaks occurred in Strasbourg in 1374 and 1418. The 1518 dancing plague (I read as I feverishly Googled) was one of many such medieval events, wherein ordinary people had the sudden compulsion to dance. This compulsion spread around the population like a contagion, until hundreds of people were dancing themselves into a state of collapse or even death.

And so in one scene we also see Jesus bleeding from the abdomen, with blood spilling down as scarlet thread. This is mixed medium art, conceptually anchored in religious iconography. It is remarkable.Joe Decie: So this new book, The Dancing Plague, rather than me doing a big preamble, could you tell me about it? Pretend I haven't just read it. What's the story? Creator description: The Dancing Plague tells a true story, from 1518, when hundreds of inhabitants of Strasbourg were suddenly seized by the strange and unstoppable compulsion to dance, from the imagined perspective of Mary, one of its witnesses. Prone to mystic visions as a child, betrayed in the convent to which she flees, then abused by her loutish husband, Mary endures her life as an oppressed and ultimately scapegoated woman with courage, strength, and inspiring beauty. All artwork in the book is created using pyrography and embroidery on calico. At the same time, I didn't want the artwork to be too similar to medieval art, I felt that it might hinder the readers connection to the characters. The embroidered part of the art is much more directly influenced by medieval art than the pyrographic artwork. I had a great time researching medieval demons and bands of angels in medieval manuscripts and paintings and translating them into stitch. I was looking at Bruegel for the pyrographic art and Bosch for the embroidery. the focus is on the dancing plague that broke out in late mediaeval Strasbourg, when one woman’s uncontrollable dancing developed into a kind of mass epidemic.