When The Woodlands Danced: The Dancing Queen Flash Mob of 2011

Picture early 2011. Your phone had a camera that was finally good enough, everybody had just discovered Facebook events, and YouTube was full of strangers bursting into choreographed dance in train stations. For a couple of years, the flash mob was the most fun thing on the internet, and every town wanted one.

It started as a joke. In June 2003, Harper’s Magazine editor Bill Wasik sent an anonymous email that sent about 130 people to the rug department at Macy’s in Manhattan, where they gathered around one expensive rug, then scattered. He called it a social experiment. Within a year “flash mob” was in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Then the dancers took over. In 2009 a crowd at Antwerp’s central station broke into “Do-Re-Mi” to promote a Belgian TV search for a Sound of Music lead. Fans staged “Beat It” tributes after Michael Jackson died that summer. And on September 8, 2009, Oprah opened her season on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, where a crowd of about 21,000 danced along to the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.”

By 2010 the flash mob had gone mainstream. On October 30, the Opera Company of Philadelphia surprised Macy’s shoppers with a burst of Handel. A few weeks later, about 450 singers filled the Crown Center in Kansas City with the Hallelujah Chorus. Those videos were shared millions of times, and church choirs, dance studios and wedding parties everywhere took notes.

Houston caught the bug too. A baseball-themed mob was set for Town & Country Center on February 26, 2011, with the details posted online five days early. That was a sign of how things had changed. The original flash mobs were secret. The 2011 kind came with rehearsals.

March 6 was a bright, cloudless afternoon. The lawn at Central Park in Market Street filled in from the edges, with families on the steps, strollers parked along the walk and kids running loops on the grass while everyone waited for the music. Then “Dancing Queen” started, and the boas came out.

Here’s the dance as we filmed it from the edge of the lawn. MetroWebTV was there too, and its video is on YouTube.

The craze didn’t last. By the summer of 2011, “flash mob” was turning up in news about crowds organized online for trouble, and Philadelphia set a curfew that August. The cheerful kind faded into wedding proposals and holiday ads.

But for one Sunday afternoon, The Woodlands had its own, in boas, on the grass at Market Street.

Sources: CultureMap Houston (Feb. 24, 2011); NBC Chicago (2009); NPR (2010); ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer; Wikipedia, “Flash mob”.

More of the community’s past is on The Woodlands Texas History page.