Flash! A Mob Takes Qwest Field at Half-Time

70,000 football fans. 1,000 random Seattle-area Facebook users. Eleven songs. Six and a half minutes.

If you happen to be watching the Seahawks half-time show (which should be right about when this post goes live, say 3:30 p.m.-ish, Sunday, Sept. 12th., I hope), you might notice a slightly unusual performance. Something like the bastard child of '80s guerrilla theater and musicals from Hollywood's Golden Age, the event has, over the past few weeks, become a local open secret. It is, after all, incredibly difficult to hide hundreds of people gathering at venues across the city to dance in unison. (The big honkin' speakers are also a little conspicuous.)

As Goldfinger so pithily stated: Once is coincidence; twice is happenstance; three times is enemy action. A dozen or so occurrences is a flash mob in training.

The Stadium Flash Mob is the brain-child of mob producer Egan Orion, with the help of choreographer Bobby Bonsey. The two are also responsible for Seattle's Glee Flash Mob, and Beat It, a Michael Jackson tribute flash mob. Flash mobs can range from highly choreographed versions, such as the Sound of Music mob performed in an Antwerp train station or the Sydney Harbour Dance-Off flash mob, to the more spontaneous and free-form mobs in which people gather in a public area to suddenly "freeze" or laugh.

The usual common denominator of a flash mob, nearly the definition, is that the participants appear to be part of the crowd until the moment of performance. The Qwest Stadium Mob is slightly different; due to the venue, permission had to be acquired beforehand and various logistical and security arrangements made. The spirit of community and shared conspiracy is nonetheless authentic to the spirit of flash mobs.

Geographically, the dancers are mostly Seattle residents, but Tacoma and other regional metro areas sent along a few, and one came all the way from Texas (although not necessarily solely for the mob). Only a very few of the Stadium Flash Mob performers are professional dancers, the same proportion as in any other song-and-dance style mob. The rest are very enthusiastic non-dancers. Some have participated in previous flash mobs, but most have not.

Kelly Simon, a first-time mobber and executive assistant at a local start-up, surprised herself not only by joining the mob, but by how committed she became to the project. For the past two weeks, like many of the mobbers, she has practiced at home to a training video on You Tube, in addition to attending regular group rehearsals. Professionally, it takes all kinds: lawyers, mechanics, bank tellers, and lots and lots of currently unemployed, recently unemployed, or underemployed types rank among the participants.

This last explains some of the sudden popularity of musical flash mobs over the past two years. During previous recessions, Americans have demonstrated a desire for escapism, especially that of the singing, dancing, and shiny, shiny costumes variety. During the Depression, Broadway and Hollywood satisfied that desire, staging and screening lavishly glamorous spectacles that defied grim reality, at a price that almost anyone could afford.

Today's big Hollywood movies are more likely to feature explosions. Things go boom, but the hunger for a better version of the world, a version in which people spontaneously burst into laughter or dance in the streets, remains. Flash mobs are also cheaper than a movie, participatory, and  community-oriented. The movie industry reported record-high ticket receipts for 2009, amid declining attendance. The difference was made up by the record-high price of cinema tickets. Flash mobs are generally free for both observers and participants, although the nature of flash mobs is such that the line between participant and observer is obscured.

Flash mobs are absolutely dependent on tools like Facebook and You Tube. Quick, cheap, mass communication has spawned a numer of social phenomena; there is no way to know which will last or what will be born next, or in what very serious and historically important ways these tools will affect society, and blah blah blah. There are people paid to have very serious and important opinions about those things, but really-- wouldn't you rather dance? At least 1,000 answered that question with a resounding, "Yes!" Myself included.