Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Tuesday, November 9, 2004

From Flash-Mob To Mo-Club

The Hard Dance London, an online site following the trendy London dance scene, reported this past Saturday:

"On Waterloo Station a middle aged lady with handbag in one hand and mobile phone in the other looks down for a second and stares in bemusement at two young ladies who begin dancing to the sound of their personal stereos.

She shakes herself to check her senses are not playing tricks as a Conga line streams past behind her with 20 or 30 people listening to their own personal stereos.

dancing_in_the_street3502oo.jpg
Photo credit:Pat-swan a.k.a The Green Carbuncle (32) Salzburg, Salburgerland, Austria

Other commuters look on dumbfounded.

Welcome to the world of Mobile Clubbing.

Simply, mobile clubbing is turning up at a pre-arranged public place on mass where you begin to dance to the sound of your own personal stereo.

It is unclear where the concept of Mobile Clubbing originates but one thing is clear and that in the world of spontaneous mass public gatherings, it has replaced Flash Mobbing.

Throughout the UK, events are organised on the Internet, informally among groups of friends and the word passes via chat rooms and news forums.

But what is the point of meeting on mass and dancing to the sound of your own personal stereo?"

Good question indeed!

Mobile clubbing takes last year Flash Mobbing experimentation in a new direction by bringing together small crowds of dancing people in public places, via unpublicized Internet invitations.

Mobile clubbing, or "moclubbing", as I feel naturally to pronounce it, is indeed a fascinating new form of creative and communal expression that fully leverages the effectiveness of the Internet in bringing together, within a very short time notice, groups of people who have never met or encountered before.

A group of people dancing in a public space, be it an underground station, an historical square or a public park is a marvelous form of creative expression, tolerance, and celebration of life.

I am personally fascinated by the idea and would like very much to be part of one such event, if not even to facilitate its possible organization. Living in a beautiful city such as Rome, I have at my disposal such amazing scenarios, that the possibility of moclubbing feels just like a long-due opportunity for intelligent sublimation of youth's energies while taking to the sky the Internet communication and social networking potential.

In one way or another I have long desired to see young people being able to express and share their immense energies without needing to be boxed inside dark closed spaces called discos. As much as I love people having great fun together I wholeheartedly resist the often too-artificial rituals of city night-life: getting stoned or boozed to the excess, showing off with little passion or glory, getting too stuck with machoism and sex, and all that "mind-mess" that comes with it.

How wonderful would it be for all those that seek to express themselves with dance and body movement to do so, in the open, in beautiful places, within a large and protective group of instant-friends, and to their preferred beat!

Yes, because in a mobile clubbing event, everyone is listening through headphones to their preferred music.

Of all the ideas that make up moclubbing, the one that makes everyone free to dance to her own music, leaves me with some curious questions in my mind:
Wouldn't it be even nicer if we could all be tuned in the same frequency? (not always, just sometimes).

That is, if the event was staged in coordination with a private radio station, (which could certainly benefit from the exposure and buzz built around this event), couldn't all the moclubbers dance to the same groove?

Wouldn't that be even cooler?

In such a scenario, independent radio stations would be the perfect promotion vehicle for these types of events and one sure effective approach to build loyalty, positive promotion and a powerful viral buzz, always awaiting and seeking info about the next public moclub.


For future moclubbing events near you check out http://www.mobile-clubbing.com.

To sign-up to create your own local moclub event go here.

What do you think?

 

 

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Readers' Comments    
2004-11-11 11:08:15

Rak Razam

Hi there,

we're the barrelfull of monkeys a trance music activist crew from MElbourne, Australia and we conducted some 'silent dancing' flash mob parties earlier this year.

Good to see the vibe is spreading!

check out our links below,

bom

rak razam

http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/05/1096949496955.html?oneclick=true

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org/100thmonkey.html



 
posted by Robin Good on Tuesday, November 9 2004, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015

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