Saket Vora

I think ImprovEverywhere is great. For those that don’t know, it is a NYC-based group started by people who wanted to do some improv humor well…everywhere. I believe that the group’s intent is to inject some wonder and curiosity into the world to counter people’s day-to-day routine life. They group puts on ‘missions’ and documents them. For instance, they had 200+ people simply freeze in place for 5 minutes in the middle of Grand Central Station. They had 50 people dressed in khakis and blue polo shirts walk into a Best Buy. They enacted a spontaneous musical in a mall’s food court. They gave some little league baseball kids the best game of their lives. They placed a Starbucks store into a time loop for an hour.

It’s the sort of thing where a person who experiences it would go back to their home and tell their family, “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me today!” And I think this world needs more of that.

One of their missions is something called the MP3 Experiment. They record a 45 minute mp3 and post it to the website. People download it to their mp3 player, but don’t listen it. They are told to go somewhere (usually a park) and at a precise time, press play and do whatever the voice tells them to do.

photo: IanMain

On Saturday my friends and I took part of the San Francisco MP3 Experiment held at Mission Dolores Park.  We were told to wear either a blue, green, yellow, or red shirt and to bring an umbrella. The weather could not have been better. We could spot people we thought was there for the mission, but the park was bustling with other activity. At 2pm, we pushed play and it began. The big reveal I think for most people was when we all opened our umbrellas up and started spinning them while holding them high and moved across the park to congregate in the middle of the main field. I could hear a little girl looking around and saying “Daddy, why do all those people have umbrellas?”

The experiment was fun and it ended with an epic showdown between the green/blue shirts vs the red/yellow shirts. A sizable number of people was looking on at that point and a helicopter was flying above (though I think it was part of the ImprovEverywhere team). I could imagine how weird it would be to see over a 100 people act out motions in unison without hearing any loudspeakers or the participants speaking anything.

I spotted Charlie Todd, the creator and leader of ImprovEverywhere, and went over to shake his hand and wish him and his group well. Some of my readers will be pleased to know that Charlie is an alum of UNC-Chapel Hill. :)

Full coverage will be up in a few weeks, I’ll post an update then.