Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

            In 2001, New York comedian and Upright Citizen’s Brigade improvisational performer, Charlie Todd formed Improv Everywhere. The public performances organized and created by the team have spawned such national and global phenomena as “No Pants Day”, celebrated annually in Austin, Boise, San Francisco, and San Antonio, and the now international spontaneous art events inspired by “Frozen Grand Central” where crowds stood still as living statues. Charlie Todd draws from Web enabled ‘smart’ or ‘flash mob’ events that grew out of the juncture of public performance art and social activism. The art events of Charlie Todd and Improv Everywhere have the distinction over some other ‘spontaneous’ public hijnks (think Jackass, Punk’d) in that they are never geared to belittle or frighten the public but instead as stated in their website, ‘cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places’.[1]

            Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote, “Of all secular institutions, the theater is the only remaining one of any power and universal validity that links our love of festival, our joy in spectacle and laughter, the pleasure that we take in being touched, excited…”[2] Whether one believes that Hofmannsthal’s statement is injected with hyperbole, it is clear that theatre’s ability to incite joy is palpable and universal. Todd’s intention to make space for the human potential for joy through art should be taken seriously before discarding it along with some whose efforts reach no higher than ‘gotcha’ scares and prankster practical jokes.

            Charlie Todd and the I.E. art collective reveals the playful art and community that is available in our everyday lives. In many ways, their public, participatory, collaborative theatre model characterizes what Hans Georg Gadamer describes in TheRelevance of The Beautiful. Todd helps orchestrate what might be called a celebration or festival, of which Gadamer writes, “Celebrating is an art…If we ask ourselves what the real nature of this art is, then obviously we must reply that it consists in an experience of community.”[3] Art as festival dissolves individualism and expands by deleting walls of exclusion and spills over in liberality and elation.

            Todd and I.E.’s artwork Food Court Musical or Can I Get A Napkin Please? as it is commonly known as, exemplifies the festive celebratory character. In the piece, a local mall’s food court is transformed from mundane venue for unpalatable faire into a singing, dancing fair of a musical revue. A woman jumps up from a spill and asks for a napkin and soon sixteen performers are spiraling about in the sun filled atrium. Community is more than the physical closeness our urbanized spaces offer increasingly. Community needs also intention “that unites us and prevents us as individuals from falling into private conversations and private, subjective experiences.”[4] The tragedy of a hurricane or flood, the hardships of poverty, the round of beer, or the sports competition can draw out the availability of community in unsuspected and astounding ways, and festive public theatre is no different. Food Court Musical drew private subjective experiences together into not only an audience, but a community of interpreters, interacting and participating freely in art as one.

            The experience of community changes us. It creates a new way of seeing the world and being in it. One way that Gadamer explains it is through distinguishing ‘empty time’ and ‘fulfilled time’. In empty time, normalcy reigns and is epitomized in the experience of boredom which is related to the angst of existence. Another character of empty time is the hurriedness of errands, the frantic dash of calculated agendas that never are given space to the moment, but are projected into deadlines before us. In contrast, fulfilled time puts aside management and calculation aside and time is brought to stand in what Gadamer calls an artistic ‘organic unity’. Improv Everywhere’s art includes openly and without distinction to interact with and participate in the work-to be co-creators. As interpreter/participants the joy of art is also met with what Gadamer calls the temporality of art. The temporal of fleeting of theatre is similarly experienced in the other public art surrounding us, the architecture, icons, and religions. This is coupled with the experience of an actor/creator: “We recognize ourselves as the plaything of the mighty, suprapersonal forces that condition our being.”[5] Accompanying the joy of art is also the unsettling of new horizons, which Todd calls ‘chaos’.

            The shaking off of one’s blinders to see the possibilities and joy gracefully availed us can be difficult and chaotic, but unlike the angst of empty time, it is a positive breeching into newness. Charlie Todd gives opportunity to lift ourselves from the easy expectations into a novel platform of inspection. In his Frozen Grand Central participants come to a complete stop all at once for a period of time in the bustle of the New York train station. Here, those human faces and people that had existed in the background of the day suddenly pop forward to exist in their own right. Like Heidegger’s transition of what is taken for granted (Zuhanden) to that which is present at hand (Vorhanden) the inhabitants of the city become more than just obstacles, they stand unmoving but startling present. It can create a chaotic spike of dissonance in one who encounters such a performance; having been presented with humanity where only passive moving objects had been before, but it opens one up all the more to the human experience.

            The correlations between religious gatherings and improvisational street art are clear. Both find greater and deeper humanity in all of its joy and chaos. Both rise into a different way of living and being in time. However, as art can operate freely from theology, the nonjudgmental inclusivity of Improv Everywhere sets a higher standard for our religious institutions to emulate. While our religious expressions set aside time and place for the celebration of values, improvisational street theatre takes the highest value of human life and gives that time and space back to the public sphere.

“Our agents returned to whatever they were doing before the song broke out, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.” –Charlie Todd on the Food Court Musical performers.   (www.improveverywhere.com)