Your humble correspondent dances disco-style at the beginning of the Love Mob (photo from the Facebook group)

I do like fun. And as long as an event has that as its primary goal, I’m all for it. Even if it’s a tired formula like a choreographed dance or a lip dub.

On Sunday, I played hookey from PodCamp to participate in an event called “Love Mob Montreal“. Not crazy about the name, but maybe that’s just because I’m not in touch with my emotional side. As I mentioned in the previous post, it was an MP3 experiment that made sense to everyone with headphones but no sense to all the bystanders without.

An anthropology student interviews Laurent Maisonnave, one of the organizers

The organization was relatively low-key (about as low-key as one can get while still getting more than 100 people to show up), and attracted fairly little mainstream media attention (are they finally getting tired of the flash mob scene?). An article in Le Devoir and a writeup at Midnight Poutine were all I found.

Of course, there was also a bit of an ulterior motive here. The event was organized with Tourism Montreal, who are using it to promote the city and its new Quartier des Spectacles (pictures of the event have been uploaded to the QdS’s Flickr account).

But they didn’t interfere with the spirit of the event by asking us to scream “I love Montreal” or anything silly like that. They simply offered the organizers a studio to record the two MP3s (one English, one French).

Follow the balloons

The MP3 files were of very good quality, and the crowd was fairly evenly divided between red and white shirts. The live organization wasn’t perfect, though. The crowd was asked to point to “John and Yoko” on the Hyatt Hotel terrace, but the doppelgangers didn’t show up until a few minutes later.

But for its faults, the event was original, and it was fun. I got pushed into dancing disco-style to “Staying Alive”, danced a waltz with a complete stranger, participated in a giant circle of hand-holding (I hope I don’t get swine flu from all that holding hands with strangers), and did other things that would have been embarrassing had everyone else not been doing them as well.

Red and white shirts mingle after the event

An experiment worth repeating next year. Though perhaps with some music from this millennium.