Dancing Splash Mob Floods the Natural History Museum

Over at the Natural History museum today, the clock struck noon and the speakers blared inside the Sant Ocean Hall. That’s when a couple hundred visitors and staffers (well, mostly staffers) started dancing.

This marks the first ever Smithsonian Flash Mob or rather, Splash Mob, as in splashing around in the ocean. While somewhere between 200 to 300 people either stared in amazed wonder or attempted to do a makeshift version of Bobby Freeman’s “The Swim,” we snapped out-of-focus candids and caught some of it on video for those of you that missed it.

And it was easy to miss. The total time was 2 minutes, 3 seconds. The music was appropriately titled “Surf” by the musician Moby. And the museum says it was all a crazy publicity stunt to get people thinking about tomorrow’s World Oceans Day.

“We wanted to do something fun, and bring visitors to the museum in a unique way,” says spokesperson Kelly Carnes, who was wearing a big orange roughy fish costume, which she attributes to “other duties as assigned.”

The museum is making a video of the event and tomorrow, you can find it at Ocean Portal. But in the meantime, check out ATM’s  version by our producer Ryan Reed.

Beth Py-Lieberman | | READ MORE

Senior editor Beth Py-Lieberman is the author of the The Object at Hand: Intriguing and Inspiring Stories from the Smithsonian Collections.