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Inprov Everywhere
Well, it's November 1, and I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year. I don't know that I can commit to it, although I think that next year, I may end up using the momentum of NaNo to get my thesis finished. I am, however, going to unofficially do NaBloPoMo. I'm not going to sign up on the website or anything, but I'm hoping to write an entry every day. An entry of some substance, that is. Something more than a daily update or a meme. I have some links that I've been meaning to share, and I might take this month to go through my blogroll and link to some of the really good blogs that I follow, and a few other things. At the end of the month, I'll see how many words I've blogged. I'm sure it won't be 50,000, but it'll be something relatively substantial, I'm sure.
I'm kind of in love with Improv Everywhere. It's a New York-based performance art group that takes large-scale pranks out into the public, and the whole "improv" concept is rooted in the way the audience responds to the performers' actions. It's kind of like a cross between Punk'd, candid camera, and performance art, and the result is really cool.
The projects themselves are fairly simple concepts, but the execution is somewhat elaborate. They often involve hundreds of people (generally volunteers who follow Improv Everywhere's website) and very detailed timing; some involve fewer people with more rehearsal time; but all of them leave the possibility open for interaction with the public, which is where it becomes performance art, in a way. I'm not a huge performance art fan--I'd rather see theatre, for the most part--but Improv Everywhere does it in a way that's less pretentious and esoteric than certain other forms of performance art. It's like meta-performance art. It knows what it is, and it does it to create moments of community, both for the "agents" who meet while doing the events and for the public who are caught in the middle of the happenings.
For instance, there's the piece where over 200 people froze in Grand Central Station at exactly the same time for the same amount of time (which was one of the first Improv Everywhere pieces I saw, and is still a definite favorite). There was the human mirror, where sets of identical twins boarded the subway, sat across from each other, and mirrored each other's actions. There was the slow-mo Home Depot, where several hundred shoppers all moved through the store in slow motion at the same time. There was the shirtless Abercrombie and Fitch project, the food court musical (which is one of my favorites), and some of them were even arrested during No Pants 2k6 (and, really, no pants 2000 through 2008). And, just because they can, they brought NBC and the Goodyear Blimp to a Little League game.
They've been around since 2001, so I know I'm a little late to the game, just discovering them in the past year or so, but it's art worth sharing.
I'm kind of in love with Improv Everywhere. It's a New York-based performance art group that takes large-scale pranks out into the public, and the whole "improv" concept is rooted in the way the audience responds to the performers' actions. It's kind of like a cross between Punk'd, candid camera, and performance art, and the result is really cool.
The projects themselves are fairly simple concepts, but the execution is somewhat elaborate. They often involve hundreds of people (generally volunteers who follow Improv Everywhere's website) and very detailed timing; some involve fewer people with more rehearsal time; but all of them leave the possibility open for interaction with the public, which is where it becomes performance art, in a way. I'm not a huge performance art fan--I'd rather see theatre, for the most part--but Improv Everywhere does it in a way that's less pretentious and esoteric than certain other forms of performance art. It's like meta-performance art. It knows what it is, and it does it to create moments of community, both for the "agents" who meet while doing the events and for the public who are caught in the middle of the happenings.
For instance, there's the piece where over 200 people froze in Grand Central Station at exactly the same time for the same amount of time (which was one of the first Improv Everywhere pieces I saw, and is still a definite favorite). There was the human mirror, where sets of identical twins boarded the subway, sat across from each other, and mirrored each other's actions. There was the slow-mo Home Depot, where several hundred shoppers all moved through the store in slow motion at the same time. There was the shirtless Abercrombie and Fitch project, the food court musical (which is one of my favorites), and some of them were even arrested during No Pants 2k6 (and, really, no pants 2000 through 2008). And, just because they can, they brought NBC and the Goodyear Blimp to a Little League game.
They've been around since 2001, so I know I'm a little late to the game, just discovering them in the past year or so, but it's art worth sharing.