Frozen in time

What would you do if, in the middle of one of the busiest railway stations on Earth, hundreds of people around you simply stopped moving? Not slowed down. Not paused to check their phones. Just froze.

That was the wonderfully simple idea behind an Improve Elsewhere stunt at Grand Central Station in New York. Hundreds of participants entered the terminal, went about their business and, at exactly the right moment, stopped dead in their tracks for five minutes. Everyone else kept moving. And that, of course, is where the fun begins.

Commuters wander through the terminal looking increasingly suspicious of reality. One man actually pushes one of the frozen participants, presumably to determine whether he has stumbled into performance art or the opening scene of a particularly low-budget apocalypse. It’s ridiculous. It’s harmless. And it’s strangely beautiful.

Naturally, once something works in New York, the rest of the world wants a piece of it. The idea spread, and by now there have apparently been freezes in 62 cities. Some took place in locations with all the atmosphere of a suburban shopping center on a Tuesday morning, but others chose their stages rather well: Trafalgar Square in London, Santa Monica in Los Angeles, Martin Place in Sydney, Place Trocadero in Paris and Stazione Termini in Rome.

A special award for unnecessary dedication should probably go to the people who did it in the rain at Powell Street in San Francisco. Standing perfectly still is one thing. Standing perfectly still while cold water runs down your neck is quite another. That’s not performance art. That’s commitment bordering on stupidity.

I’ve been to all of these places. They are places designed for movement: commuters rushing for trains, tourists wandering around with maps, taxis honking, people late for meetings they probably don’t want to attend anyway. Then, suddenly, a few hundred human beings simply refuse to participate.

Grand Central Station in New York city.

Improv Everywhere describes its mission as bringing excitement to otherwise ordinary places and demonstrating that pranks can be funny without humiliating anyone. Fair enough. The world could certainly use more pranks where nobody ends up naked, arrested or explaining themselves to Human Resources.

But there’s something else going on here. We spend much of our lives rushing from one place to another, usually convinced that whatever waits at the other end is terribly important. Cities encourage this. Get out of the way. Catch the train. Answer the phone. Buy something. Be somewhere else.

And then a few hundred strangers stop. The rest of us suddenly notice. Maybe that’s the real joke.