The date is September 10, 2009, and it’s the kickoff party for Oprah’s 24th season. The show is outside, on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, and there are over 20,000 fans in the street. The Black Eyed Peas take to the stage and begin to sing “I gotta feeling”. There is a lone woman dancing in the front, at the beginning of the song. Gradually the people next to her join in, then the people next to them. Eventually all 20,000 people are dancing - together, as one. The choreographer, the not-so-alone woman who started the dance, has successfully created a “Flash Mob”, an interactional experiment between a band - The Black Eyed Peas - and a crowd of 20,000. This was a surprise for Oprah. Nobody told her what was going to happen.

My daughter introduced me to this event by showing me the video on YouTube last night. Go here to watch it, and then come back. See if it doesn’t make you cry.

Now I call it an “interactional experiment” but you see this all the time at rock concerts. I have been going to rock concerts since my (other)daughter was 13. I have written about this elsewhere, and another day we will revisit the trauma of losing your child for 12 hours in a swarm of 12,000 people... Where was I? Oh yes: audiences interact with rock bands all the time. The band plays, the audience moshes (is that a verb?). Interactions between performers and audiences - as between therapists and their clients - happen all the time. We just naturally connect, and give and take.

This event on Oprah is an audience-band interaction writ large, as if the whole audience were an organism. You can read more about it here.

That the whole thing was carefully choreographed isn’t the point. Rather, this is a glimpse into our potential. This is the potential for society to act together as an organism for good, as an antidote to the ways in which people sometimes act together for bad. What a wonderful thing to do on the 10th of September, 8 years less a day after 9/11. Bad things cannot be erased, but good can come from them, and anniversaries can take on new meanings.

When a large collection of people come together and do something well - in theatre, in orchestra, in dance, in a flash mob - even in a baseball game (see below) - a deep emotion is evoked in me. Maybe it happens in you too.

A psychiatrist went to a baseball game. Philadelphia Phillies vs. Atlanta Braves, 1993 National League playoffs, first game. Phillies pitcher Curt Schilling strikes out the first Braves batter. “Just twenty-six more, Curt!” yells the psychiatrist, to the embarrassment of his son.

Schilling strikes out the next batter. “Just twenty-five more, Curt!” he yells, only now the other fans are beginning to come together.

When Schilling struck out the third batter, an amazing thing happened. Sixty-three thousand Phillies fans became as one, “[and] I was the very sound of one hand clapping,” writes the psychiatrist.

What does it mean? What could it mean? What could this century, this millennium, stand for in human thought and activity?

Perhaps we could all take turns playing in the band, performing what we do best to those who need it most. Perhaps we could all in turn be in the audience, taking the best that others can give and reflecting it back to them. What could happen?

We meet awkwardly.
I invite you to walk.
I find you dancing¹.

This could be the millennium for dancing.

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¹ Maria Harris (1987), Teaching & Religious Imagination: An Essay in the Theology of Teaching (San Francisco: Harper & Row), p. 23

Tags: spirituality