{"id":43136,"date":"2016-01-11T06:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uncommongoods.com\/?p=43136"},"modified":"2016-02-15T17:24:21","modified_gmt":"2016-02-15T22:24:21","slug":"uncommon-knowledge-can-you-lose-yourself-to-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/2016\/uncommon-knowledge-can-you-lose-yourself-to-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncommon Knowledge: Can You Lose Yourself to Dance?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"First<\/a>
\nYes, you can!<\/p>\n

In what could have been an excellent prequel to the tiny town in Footloose<\/a>, around 400 people fell victim to a dancing outbreak in Strasbourg, Alsace<\/a>\u00a0(now part of France).\u00a0It all began sometime in mid-July 1518 with just one woman. She stepped out onto the street and\u2014like Baby<\/a> once she got out of that corner<\/a>\u2014she danced. And danced. Aaaaand danced. Within a week, the same force consumed about 100 more people.<\/p>\n

In what could have been a plot device for a 1940s movie musical, town officials figured the best way to deal with this madness was to just go with it\u2014and so they set up musicians in reserved guildhalls<\/a>, pipers and all. By the end of August 1518, almost 400 people had experienced the madness and it didn\u2019t recede until early September. Some even died from weak hearts.<\/p>\n

So what happened? Compulsive dancing had been seen before, but nothing quite at this Studio 54<\/a>-level scope. The most popular theory attributes the dance fever to a trance-like state. Things in Strasbourg weren\u2019t too great at the time\u2014the city\u2019s poor were suffering from severe famine and disease\u2014and they also believed in St. Vitus<\/a>, a saint who was thought to have the power to take over minds and inflict compulsive dance. This belief, along with an ever-unraveling daily life could have led to a trance-like state that made them act out the part of the accursed.<\/p>\n

This is all speculation, of course. We don\u2019t know exactly what caused or ended this nonstop dance party, but we do know that a dance craze of this magnitude hasn\u2019t been seen since\u2014unless, of course, you count the Macarena craze of the 1990s<\/a>, which can still be observed at your cousin\u2019s wedding, your nephew\u2019s bar mitzvah, and on late, late nights at the karaoke bar.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

First Dance Personalized Art<\/a> | $300.00 – 500.00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History tells us that the answer is “yes.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":43148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1208],"tags":[1950,813],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43136"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44244,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43136\/revisions\/44244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}