You know what works? Dancing.
An extra technique for staying sane in despair (Part 2 of Chapter 17)
It is now our duty to manage deep, hard emotions for each other. Here’s another way to go about it - dancing. Sounds woo-woo. It’s not. This is a short chunk. It couldn’t fit on the previous post.
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Oh, and we can dance!
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“I danced myself right out the womb
Is it strange to dance so soon?”
- T.Rex, Cosmic Dancer
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In 1928, Miss Gladys Lenz from Seattle, danced for 19 hours straight. She was competing in a dance marathon for the $1000 first prize. Several hours in poor Gladys was punched in the face by one of her partners who had descended into a fatigue-induced psychosis. But she kept going, churning through partners.
Tragically, Gladys came fifth. And promptly committed suicide.
I’d read a while back about the dance marathon craze that swept Europe and America during those in-between – liminal – years between the world wars that we covered earlier. Young people in the deepest of despair, having lost friends, lovers and siblings to both a war and a pandemic, would attend these organised competitions like you might an open mic night. Sometimes they’d dance for months, with only 15-minute breaks. Paying audiences would cheer from the bleachers and a newspaper at the time described the craze as, “A macabre modern equivalent of a homicidal Roman gladiatorial spectacle”.
Humans also danced after the Black Death. There are reports of monks traveling across Europe encountering villages where people danced as though under a crazed spell. We also danced in the wake of the French Revolution. During the four-year liminal period before Napoleon stormed the scene, the bourgeoisie who still had heads intact took to hosting debauched dance parties. They were known as the incroyables and the merveilleuses; they wore their hair long and dressed in deliberately ill-fitting clothes, imitating the prisoners who had been sent to the guillotine a few years earlier. Instead of bowing their head to greet each other, they shook it in all directions to imitate the convulsive movements of a person mid-beheadment.
This is a piece of trivia I feel compelled to add: These incroyables and merveilleuses also took to dropping the “r” from words , “r” being the first letter of “revolution”. The whole vibe then crossed the channel and morphed into dandyism in England, which was known for its associated speech impediment.1
I was curious to know when “disco mania” landed. Google tells me it was 1975. The year the Vietnam war ended.
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French historian Philippe de Felicé wrote, “Eras of greatest material and moral distress seem to be those during which people dance most.”