Blame it on the boogie

Published 09 August 2004

Popular culture - A hundred people dancing on a station concourse? Dan Hancox explains

It started with flash mobs. Participants would randomly arrive at, say, a furniture shop and lie down on the beds simultaneously before saying, "Ooh, comfy", and then departing. These bizarre acts of playful subversion swept the world for about six months, before the Daily Mail killed them off by organising its own flash mob. Now two young British artists, Emma Davis and Ben Cummins, have given us flash mobbing's latest spawn: mobile clubbing.

Arranged, like flash mobbing, through posts on the internet, mobile clubbing requires participants to turn up at the stated location - usually a station concourse - switch on their personal stereos at a specific time and then "dance like there's nobody watching". A couple of weeks ago, there were events in Hong Kong, New York and London.

For the clubbers, the experience is an opportunity to enjoy their favourite music in an environment normally associated with joyless commuterdom. It's also about reclaiming a public space increasingly crowded with advertising and consumer-ism. For those watching, it is a surprise to see scores of people dancing to an inaudible beat, but one that usually brings a smile to the face. Self-consciously or not, mobile clubbing is also a modern updating of the situationist notion of detournement, where contexts associated with "the spectacle" (that is, normal society) are altered in order to put across a message that challenges the status quo. The immediate message to commuters may be "These people look ridiculous", but that is beside the point; ridicule is nothing to be scared of, as Adam Ant once sang.

What marks out mobile clubbing and flash mobbing from situationist detournement is its light-heartedness. A sense of fun did at times pervade the events in Paris in May 1968, but more often the reclamation of public space ended in tears. The triumphant occupation of the Odeon theatre by students who had been evicted from the Sorbonne was initially welcomed by the actor and theatre manager Jean-Louis Barrault, but the mood quickly worsened when between 8,000 and 10,000 students swarmed through the corridors and auditorium. By 28 May, they had found the Odeon's costume store and, as Barrault recalled, "delivered (it) to veritable destruction . . . 20 years of work soiled, ravaged, annihilated . . . I burst out in sobs". Mobile clubbing, by contrast, is more Groucho Marxism than ideologically motivated rebellion.

Which is not to say that it hasn't already been caught up in some of the great debates of our time. A recent post on the mobile clubbing website warns that media attention is leading advertisers in the direction of Britain's private dancers: "They intend to transform your good intentions and beautiful moves into hard cash and label you a promotional puppet for their latest consumer product." Davis and Cummins have asked mobile club-bers to sign a list denying advertisers the right to use any ill-gotten footage of them dancing for their own purposes. Such is the level of cynicism about the lengths PR companies will go to that one onlooker at a recent mobile clubbing event, when questioned by the Independent, said he was "convinced they were selling something at first - possibly headphones".

But who can blame the cynics? In an age when the likes of Nike and Diesel offer inordinate sums of money to anti-advertising "culture jammers" to switch teams and produce "ironic" adverts about their use of sweatshops, co-option is the theme of the moment. It is what the situationists called recuperation, the opposite of detournement, whereby radical images and ideas are co-opted and commodified within the confines of "spectacular" society.

Furthermore, a friend of mine attended a more traditional club night a few months back (traditional in that it was in a club) and was shocked to see two men on the dance floor dressed up like the moustachioed 1970s athletes in the 118 118 adverts - the shocking thing being that they weren't just wacky students in fancy dress, but seemed to be employed as living, breathing billboards for the directory enquiries company.

I'm not sure that Davis and Cummins, the mobile club mobilisers, need to be quite so concerned about dastardly advertisers stealing their collective souls, if only because it's distinctly unclear what product could be advertised by images of people in their work clothes, eyes shut, dancing like crazy. Headphones companies rarely produce TV ads, so the footage would have to be used for some lifestyle-enhancing alcopop, perhaps accompanied by a slogan: "Want to boogie while Rome burns? Drink Acme Sambuca!"

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