Freeze!!!

Social experiment 'Freeze' a hit amongst the youths


ADIB NOOR
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN
Thursday, July 2, 2009



THE public saw something unexpected on Sunday at The Mall. What they saw was something to behold, people walking and suddenly freezing in suspended animation.

The event was organised by a group of young people with a vision who call themselves "SomethingToDoWithBeans". Their objective was to provoke the minds of the public.

This random act of street performance arts is open to the general public's own interpretation. The whole public display of expression was the brain child of the initial five founders.

"We wanted to introduce Brunei to something different, a form of performance art and see the reaction given by the public," said Ben Stone, one of the founders, in an interview with The Brunei Times.

" It was our own private social experiment," he added.

What was more amazing was the huge number of volunteers who actually participated.

In just a short period of time (two weeks), more than a hundred people attended the briefing held at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Gadong and participated in the public display of self expression.

This was made possible with the use of the Internet especially social networking sites such as Facebook as well as the increasingly popular Twitter.



"We just invited close friends and the whole thing spread like wild fire,"said Ben.

Some of the participants informed the organisers that they heard about the event through forwarded emails, word of mouth and forwarded invites from Facebook which reached the people of Brunei all around the four districts.

Initially, the whole set up was organised out of the curiosity of the group wondering how people would react? Who would participate in such an extreme public display?

At the event, the volunteers spread themselves out around the target venue, in this case, the ground floor of The Mall and froze for a period of five minutes precisely at 3:20pm.

At that exact moment, groups of people (non-participants) crowded the human statues some taking pictures of the different poses and some actually recorded the whole thing which can be seen on another popular site YouTube—the official video is still in the editing process and will be uploaded once completed.

The group initially predicted that the number of participation would be roughly around 20 to 40 but the turn up on the day itself was beyond their expectation. Almost 200 people showed up comprising mostly of youths.

"Even senior citizens (joined)! I was surprised with the warm reception we got," said Ben.

As for the initial objective of the event, it quickly developed into something more than just a random act of public performance.

A group of participants took the opportunity to spread the H1N1 awareness by donning on protective masks and in their "freeze pose" displaying a sign that read " H1N1 Help Us!".

With that notion more and more volunteers suggested ideas and supported the group for organising the whole unique event.





"Other groups sometimes focus on only talking but we emphasise more on action and with the suggestions and response from the volunteers who participated in the mass display of public expression (and in a way a bit of performing arts), we will organise another unexpected activity so look out for updates soon," said Ben.

The Brunei Times

(Text taken from the Brunei Times website http://www.bt.com.bn/en)