an imaginary dance which people are supposed to perform as they are being led to their death by a skeleton (=a body consisting only of bones) representing death. It was very common in pictures and drawings in the Middle Ages, but there are also descriptions of it in music and literature. or danse macabre or skeleton dance Medieval allegorical concept of the all-conquering and equalizing power of death, expressed in the drama, poetry, music, and visual arts of western Europe, mainly in the late Middle Ages. It is a literary or pictorial representation of a procession or dance of both living and dead figures, the living arranged in order of their rank, from pope and emperor to child, clerk, and hermit, and the dead leading them to the grave. It was given impetus by the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War. Though depictions declined after the 16th century, the theme was revived in literature and music of the 19th-20th centuries
allegorical dance in which a skeleton dances a group of people to the grave (representing the power of death)