Confounding Public Expectations

You've probably seen this video documentation of the Grand Central performance by Improv Everywhere based in New York City as it is hugely popular on the internet and has been viewed over 11 million times on YouTube. However, the group has done more than 70 missions using social networking tactics to draw together willing participants in their public works.

Reminiscent of Michael Kirby's 1960s New York Happenings and Adrian Henri Liverpool movement, a phrase coined by Allan Kaprow for performance art and spontaneous street theater, IE has taken public happenings to a whole new level. As interesting as missions can or cannot be, the social networking methods Improv Everywhere uses to assemble a group, focus the public on a temporary happening, documenting it and then just as quickly disperse into the ether, punctuates the surprise element the unexpected interruption can accomplish.

In a recent mission, three agents, as IE calls them, haul their desktop wifi enabled computer CPU, monitor and keyboard into a Starbucks and start working as if nothing is abnormal at all. "Their schlepping! Their computer! Their server! Their keyboard!" says one customer outside the coffeeshop in Manhattan. Improv Everywhere's missions are conceived to cause observers to rethink place and their routine expectations. Perhaps more skillful than any previous pubic art performance has been IE ability to document their missions on video for wide-spread dissemination and ultimately historic preservation.

You usually have to do a lot to break the ice and get noticed on the NYC Subway system but No Pants certainly can get a person noticed in New York. And if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere...

Improv Everywhere's Freeze in Grand Central Station has been watched replicated in 80 cities in 30 countries and No Pants has been performed in January every year in New York since 2002 as well as 12 cities worldwide. Comedian Charlie Todd, one of the founders of IE, says he is in talks to produce a national program based on IE performances.