It was a time of high-octane thrills as cavorting couples put themselves through brutal competitions in the hope of winning the equivalent of a year’s salary. Now sculptor Nicole Wermers has brought the dancefloor craze back to life

Marathon Dance Relief, the latest intriguing work by Nicole Wermers, focuses on the Depression-era craze for endurance dancing competitions, mainly in the US in the 1920s and 30s, where cavorting couples put themselves through brutal, sometimes week-long contests in the hope of winning prizes equivalent to a year’s salary, if they could be the last ones standing. On show at St Carthage Hall in Lismore, Waterford, Ireland, the work is a departure from Wermers’ usual interest in the art of “lounging around”. In contrast to her normal languid figures, the subject here is the body when exhausted or taking strenuous exertion.

Cruder class dynamics – the contestants were almost by definition down-at-heel and watched by more affluent audiences – hovered in the background of such spectacles. Although they gathered swift momentum as a low-cost form of high-octane, mass entertainment, their exploitations took a toll on their participants and could, in rare cases, lead to injury and death. Dovetailing with the era’s boom in photography and the rise of the American picture magazine, many black and white snapshots attesting to these merciless dancefloors remain in circulation as a sombre archive, showing woozy couples slumped and clutching at each other, holding one another up in the effort to stay in the game and not collapse.