Several folks have emailed this story to us over the past couple of days. It seems a group of Libertarians in DC went to the Jefferson Memorial on Saturday night to celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s birthday by dancing silently with their iPods (similar to our Mp3 Experiments.) The event was broken up by DC police, and one of the participants was arrested and detained for several hours.
In the [first video] you can watch the group as they quietly danced around the memorial (which, to be clear, is open to the public 24 hours a day, according to its web site). A U.S. Park Police officer can then be seen approaching the dancers and telling them to leave.
The second video, posted below, shows the dancers arguing with Park Police officers about why they’re being asked to leave. They say they were quietly dancing with headphones on to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday, and that they weren’t breaking any laws (which, as far as we can tell, they indeed were not). Toward the end of the video, you can see Oberwetter, 28, being handcuffed and taken into custody.
For our latest mission, we turned a little league baseball game in Hermosa Beach, California into a major league event. Enjoy the video below and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.
**Mission:Singapore had an artist pretend to paint on a plain white canvas.
**GuerilLA had folks who seemed like strangers spontaneously come together for a game of Follow The Leader at the Getty Center
**The Global Freeze Phenomenon continues. We have a list of all 52 global freezes (in 27 different countries.) The latest freezes in Brussels and Beijing were covered by CNN.
We got a nice note from the people at the “remhq” YouTube account: “Sincere apologies and do note us on team REM love the stuff you guys do.” They added the appropriate credit to the YouTube video description. Thanks guys! I’ve been listening to R.E.M. since I bought Document on cassette back in middle school, so it’s cool to find out that they (or at least their marketing people) are Improv Everywhere fans.
UPDATE: remhq removed the video from their YouTube account and sent us a note saying they are going to re-edit the footage to credit us in the video itself.
UPDATE 2: R.E.M. decided to just remove the video for good.
The above R.E.M. YouTube video was posted to their official “remhq” channel this afternoon. It seems that R.E.M. (or more likely some marketing person at Warner Brothers) replicated our Grand Central “freeze” mission for the purpose of marketing their new album. If you look closely you can see they actually branded the event itself; a few of the frozen people are holding umbrellas that say “R.E.M.”
We’ve always been completely supportive of regular folks going out and replicating our missions in other cities. We even started an entire website to make it easier for people to do so. Over the past two months there have been 50 different “freeze” missions in 27 different countries from China to Lithuania. It’s been an international movement of people creating fun, independent events.
It’s sort of shocking to see this video which gives absolutely no credit to us and presents the concept of “getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area” as their own original idea. To ignore the fact that the “freeze craze” has already been an international phenomenon and to present it as something that was inspired by a new R.E.M. album is pretty lame.
Imitation is sincerest form of flattery, we suppose.
UPDATE 2: remhq removed the video from their YouTube account and sent us a note saying they are going to re-edit the footage to credit us in the video itself.
UPDATE 3: R.E.M. decided to just remove the video for good.
Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 70 missions involving thousands of undercover agents. The group is based in New York City.
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