I haven’t taken a dance class since I was 13, and the extent of my grooving skills back then was a couple of pirouettes and a fancy little kick-turn that my friends and I would practice at the bus stop until we were dizzy. I still love to move, but the grind of daily life and the self-consciousness that sets in when you’re supposed to be a “grown-up” keeps me from, well, shaking my rump while waiting for public transportation. But then I caught a rumor drifting around campus.
Some students of dance professor Gill Wright Miller ‘74 were planning a flash mob that would take place on the Academic Quad on a spring Friday afternoon. What fun, I thought. And that was the extent of it. But when the rumor came back to me again–this time when James Hale ‘78, the magazine’s associate editor, told me that the students wanted staff to participate–the words tumbled out of my mouth before I had time to reel them back in: “Could I be in it?”
The next day, there I was in the dance building, side-stepping and turning along with a handful of dance students, several staffers, and the flash mob’s choreographer Connie Bergstein Dow ‘73 (who also happens to be Denison’s first dance major). Afterward, I left feeling elated and jabbering on to James, who was there in the role of campus photographer, about how great this was; about how I was planning to practice at home; about how I’d need to download the song, “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz, from iTunes; about how smart (and patient) my student- teacher, Michael Ivy ‘13, was; about how we needed to keep the secret; about how we should let a couple of people in on the secret; about how this was the perfect way to spend a morning at work. By the time we reached the top of the hill, James was tired of my blathering, and I was out of breath.
Flash mobs got their start in 2003, when the editor of Harper’s Magazine, Bill Wasik, organized a group of more than 100 people to descend on a Manhattan Macy’s department store all in search of a rug for their warehouse home, which they claimed they all shared. Since then, there has been a random pillow fight in Canada, a silent disco in London, and a tightly choreographed dance in Belgium’s Antwerp Station. Search “flash mob” on YouTube and you’ll get a slew of videos–everything from random dancing in public spaces to freeze mobs during which participants freeze for minutes at a time, seemingly oblivious to staring passers-by. When the mob is over, dancers, freezers, pillow-fighters simply walk away as if nothing has happened.
The idea behind Denison’s flash mob was inspired by the 2010-11 Spectrum Series, “Community and Technology,” which served as the college’s intellectual theme for the year. Now, flash mobs have always depended on technology–social media sites, email, and text messaging–to gather participants. But our students decided to keep technological messaging to a minimum. An email was sent out here and there, but in order to keep things under wraps, most messages were passed by word of mouth.
When the day of the show arrived, the sun was shining, it was warm, and A-Quad was crawling with students, most of whom knew that something was going to happen, but few seemed sure what that something was. When the music kicked in, the crowd cheered and snapped photos, and we boogied, thrilled that this was actually–finally– happening. And, sure, I got a real sense of community in those three minutes out on the quad. But I felt the most camaraderie on the Tuesday before the big show, when the dancers gathered down by the practice football field. It was rainy and cold, and I brought my three-year-old son, Sam, to watch and even shake his tail if he wanted to. Gill was blasting music from the back of her Volvo, and I held Sam and danced and laughed with my fellow mobbers. I felt like I was a part of real community then, because while I can name only about five of the people who were at rehearsal that day, I know many more when I see them–and we smile and nod now when we pass each other on campus.