Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

This past Saturday at Noon the Opera Company of Philadelphia mounted a surprise performance of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah (with a lot of help from many other choruses and ensembles) in the women's shoe department at Macy's Center City, accompanied by the extraordinary Wanamaker Organ. There were over 600 participating singers! This performance was made possible by the Knight Foundation as part of their national " Random Acts of Culture " program, and coincided with the launch of the new Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia . Given the scale of this undertaking it was perhaps not as much of a complete surprise as many similar arts flash mobs have been. The singers perhaps even outnumbered the shoppers surprised by the "spontaneous" performance. Yet it still worked. The performance coincided with the regularly scheduled Noon organ concert, the performers were dressed in ordinary street clothes, often accompanied by children or partners....

As a follow-up to my earlier post, here is a link to the work of Duncan Speakman , an artist using MP3 players and sound to create a "subtle mob" as he calls it. Here is the direct link to his newest project, called " as if it were the last time ." It is almost as if we need to create a new art form category of experiential, immersive, participatory art. I don't feel that any existing art form categories adequately capture this new developing body of work.

The newest "guerrilla musical" by the New York-based group Improv Everywhere is called " Grocery Store Musical " (photo on left) was just recently shared with me and is very cool. It got me thinking about this whole new trend towards finding ways to insert art into our everyday lives, in ways that are designed to jolt us out of our complacency, our routine. Many have seen the Belgian train station choreographed dance , which has been seen THIRTEEN MILLION times. A special favorite of mine is a flash mob dance routine that appeared in an episode of Weeds (featuring a great song by Michale Franti and Spearhead!). Check it out here . And in Philly a flash mob dance was organized on the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps. (With apologies to the organizers, not in the same league as the best of this sort of work - keep trying!) There is a group called " Urban Prankster " that has a web site and documents these sort of flash mob projects all around the world, b...