Christian DuComb, Assistant Professor of English in the University Theater, and Jessica Benmen ’16 have co-authored an article in the latest issue of Performance Research titled “Flash Mobs, Violence and the Turbulent Crowd.”
On the evening of 30 May 2009, thousands of teenagers descended on South Street — a lively shopping district on the edge of Center City Philadelphia — in a turbulent gathering that the local press quickly labeled a “flash mob.” A few dozen outliers in this adolescent crowd turned violent, and in the first three months of 2010, four more violent flash mobs erupted in the city.
Through an analysis of these raucous events, DuComb and Benment argue that the structural similarity between violent and non-violent flash mobbing runs deeper than the use of eail, social media, and mobile technology as organizing tools. Regardless of whether they act with whimsy or aggression, flash mobbers disrupt the tightly laced social and spatial conventions of the contemporary city. Their actions thrust street-side spectators into what dramaturg Eugenio Barba calls “a sudden vortex,” a performative encounter that “shatters the security of comprehension and is experienced as turbulence.”