“Let the sun shine”

Never before have I been so proud to be a part of the theatre department here.
This week on campus is “Springtopia,” an event designed to celebrate the end of the year, the completion of another semester, and the incoming of beautiful summer weather. This year, along with the other planned festivities, my improv class (which I’ve already been talking about in past posts) decided to do a little something to add to the ambiance.

This one started a few weeks ago, when Paula found a video of a train station in Germany of people spontaneously breaking into dance. The music just came from nowhere, and the dance started with only one person, slowly adding more and more as the music grew, and before too long there were over 100 men, women and children dancing to Julie Andrews voice within the station. (I learned from my journalist friend Sara Toth that this was called a “flash mob.”)

From that day on Paula was determined to have this be our final project for the class. We started choreographing and before we knew it, it was Monday morning and people were gathered in Friendship Green to celebrate Springtopia. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the 5th Dimension’s rendition of “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” started playing from the speakers.

One of my classmates, Chris Wroebel started to dance, and before the first chorus our entire class was dancing in the sun to the music. Never before have I seen such an awesome group effort that made everyone passing stop and stare.
Some of our teachers were walking around passing out flowers to everyone, and as quickly as it had begun the song ended and we dispersed into the crowd around us.
I feel like this isn’t something that can really be explained by writing it..the complete video will be online soon, but you can get a better idea by checking this out:
http://www.erietube.com/_Springtopia-at-Gannon/video/627015/3766.html

(Although one person did sum it up better than I could, Gannon Knight editor Sara Toth. The next issue will be up this week, and her column does a wonderful job of painting a picture of yesterday’s amazing morning.)

Now that the semester is ending I can’t wait til next fall, and hopefully to try this little guerrilla experiment again.