Today Is...International Dance Day

I always assumed that dancing was a result of music but it turns out that even before the invention of written languages, people were dancing to tell stories long before someone decided to join it up with banging a drum or twanging a vine.  
Today is the anniversary of the birth of Jean-Georges Noverre who is considered to be the father modern ballet, or 'poncing about with socks down the front of their pants' as my nan called it but the course of dance from our ancient ancestors to Kevin Bacon in Footloose takes in many avenues, including Strasbourg in the 16th Century where there was an epidemic, and not the usual plague of disease but a dancing epidemic.
In 1518, 400 people just started dancing and then continued dancing for months. The authorities tried to bring it to an end by bringing in musicians to give the dancers a soundtrack but instead of ending the dancing plague, this just encouraged it to keep going with people only stopping to die from exhaustion, starvation, heat exposure or any number of other possible afflictions that could come from months of endless dance.
As with most things at that time, it was blamed on demonic possession but today's scientists think it was probably ergotism and ingesting funky grains and temporary mass hysteria which leads us nicely to the 80's and the mass hysteria which was dance movies.
The era of shoulder pads and dayglo leg warmers gave us Footloose, Fame, Dirty Dancin', Flashdance and all those Breakdancin' films which inspired teenagers everywhere to stick cardboard on the floor, plonk down a ghetto blaster and spin around on their heads which i assume will inspire bloggers on 29th April in the 24th Century to write about an epidemic of 20th century teenagers writhing around like worms, moving like robots or spinning on their backs and put it down to some sort of mass hysteria and in some ways it was but rather than ingesting poisoned grains, it was due to Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.