June 7, 2011
Dancing Splash Mob Floods the Natural History Museum
Over at the Natural History museum today, the clock struck noon and the speakers blared inside the Sant Ocean Hall. That’s when a couple hundred visitors and staffers (well, mostly staffers) started dancing.
This marks the first ever Smithsonian Flash Mob or rather, Splash Mob, as in splashing around in the ocean. While somewhere between 200 to 300 people either stared in amazed wonder or attempted to do a makeshift version of Bobby Freeman’s “The Swim,” we snapped out-of-focus candids and caught some of it on video for those of you that missed it.
And it was easy to miss. The total time was 2 minutes, 3 seconds. The music was appropriately titled “Surf” by the musician Moby. And the museum says it was all a crazy publicity stunt to get people thinking about tomorrow’s World Oceans Day.
“We wanted to do something fun, and bring visitors to the museum in a unique way,” says spokesperson Kelly Carnes, who was wearing a big orange roughy fish costume, which she attributes to “other duties as assigned.”
The museum is making a video of the event and tomorrow, you can find it at Ocean Portal. But in the meantime, check out ATM’s version by our producer Ryan Reed.
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
I show up in the still of the orange fish lady. I am to the left, wearing blue pants and my red Ocean Hall docent vest.
[...] have to check out the video of the two-minute dancing “splash mob” that hit the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in D.C. yesterday. It’s [...]
[...] of the Day: The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History organized a “splashmob” — complete with fish costumes and Moby’s “Surf” — to celebrate [...]