Performers in Front of an Audience

To begin, the flash mob was a blast! While, I wasn't able to actually participate in laying down in the middle of the SUB, I was taking photographs instead. This gave me a unique vantage point to not only understand what it was like for the people or performers in the flash mob, but also to see the reactions of passersby and the reception of the performance.

As a thespian (read “theatre nerd”), flash mobs have always interested me because of the performance aspect. In high school, I was taught that all you need for theater is an actor and an audience. After taking speech 120, Oral Interpretation, I broadened my perspective to performance, specifically what makes a performance exactly that. In much the same way as theatre, for performance you need performers and an audience.

When, in this course, we briefly touched on performance studies, I took note that performance is not commercially reproducible. So how do these concepts of performance apply to the flash mob?

When everyone laid on the floor of the SUB, they were consciously performing for an audience. In this case the audience was just people who were passing through the SUB or sitting within the lobby. Our performance was one time only and it only took place for two minutes, so it was not reproducible in its original form (even though anybody could take pictures or record video).

The most interesting part of the flash mob, to me, was the reaction of the “audience” in the SUB. While some people just bustled through imagining that nothing was out of the ordinary (in spite of the sea of arms and legs swinging through the invisible snow), most people in the SUB stood and gawked. This reaction seems pretty normal, since it's quite a rarity for a group of 40 people to make snow angels on the floor of the lobby.

While our flash mob was a performance, new media played a pivotal role in organizing to make it possible. While everyone in the class had already met face to face in the classroom, I noticed many people using cell phones to text friends and I'm sure many participants went on facebook before hand to see if any of their friends could make it. Personally, I used new media to postpone the cycling club meeting that I was supposed to hold that day. I e-mailed all of the members to tell them of the change. In this way we all used new media's lack of geographic information to contact people who were not face to face with us and get them to come to the flash mob (or not go to the cycling meeting).

In summary, I'd say that our flash mob was a success. We got a group of people together to do something different that the campus population does not see often. I certainly believe that the people who passed through will remember this for some time to come and I know that I will always remember that time that we did a flash mob for a college course.

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