Mobile Clubbing? Me?

I’ve hooked up with a duo that operates under the name Foolish Operations. They are the mobile clubbing scene in Vancouver. And what is my interest you ask? Well my interest is two-fold. First, I have always been disappointed in the lack of community and political engagement found in the citizens of Vancouver. I suppose it is easier to get a couple hundred people to show up to something, or even nothing at all, in London, a city with the population of about 10 million compared to our puny 2 million (both numbers include the greater area). But still, as long as I remember, it has been tricky to get Vancouverites to buy into anything that might be construed as fun, silly, or not cool. They will aloofly await another city to try something out and then proclaim that thing over. And although mobile dancing, or flash mobbing, as it, and similar spontaneous group actions, have been theorized through their politics, I have been giving it a second look through a narcissistic lens. My personal interest is not in its politic. Rather, I am interested in it phenomenology. How does it work on my body? How does it work on me when I act abnormally in public space, space where others, people not in the know, are going to see me acting silly and un-cool? So I decide to meet Robyn Campbell’s challenge and join her and her collaborator Julie Lebel for a half an hour a day of mobile dancing over the course of 2 weeks and see what I can see.