To the delight of the crowd

The students of Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication are a creative lot, and always enthusiastic to take up a challenge or try something new. In keeping with this, a group of students from the college decided to organise a flash mob with a particular purpose — to promote this year’s edition of the Bangalore International Film Festival.

The students were already involved with helping out with the festival, and they felt that a little extra effort would go a long way in grabbing some attention. Manasa, a first-year student who was part of the mob, explains, “We were involved in handling volunteer management for the film festival. We wanted to do something additional, so we suggested a flash mob. It seemed like a good idea.”

The students immediately got to work, selecting a team that could participate in the dance. They decided against holding auditions and instead, invited anyone who was keen and enthusiastic to be a part of the group. Very soon, around 30 people had joined in and they were set to go. One of the second-year students, Kevan Anand, took up the responsibility of handling the choreography for the dance since he’s skilled in the art himself. Since there was such a large number of people who had decided to be a part of the mob, they decided to keep the steps basic.

 “In total, we had a week to prepare for the dance — so we decided to keep it simple. Instead of dancing to popular tunes or film songs, we stuck to a basic drum beat,” adds Manasa. Keeping in mind that the dance was to promote a film festival, they centred it around the theme of films.

“We enacted different emotions — like horror, romance and drama — as part of the dance. They weren’t from any particular movie, just general emotions,” elaborates Manasa. Ultimately, the students came up with quite a neat performance. They staged the flash mob at the atrium of Garuda Mall, and quite a crowd came to watch them.

“It was a weekend, so the mall was quite crowded. When we started to dance, a lot of people stopped to see what we were doing. When it was done, they told us we’d danced really well,” she smiles.