Arts group brings musical number to grocery stores
The local grocery scene was far from average Saturday and Sunday after several stores around Columbia were hit by a flash mob.
A small group of performers, organized by local arts organization Pocket Productions, sang an arrangement titled "We're Not Just Shopping for Food" in the aisles of six area grocery stores. The song was written by USC music graduate student George Fetner and inspired by Grocery Store Musical performances by New York-based group Improv Everywhere.
Jay Zenger, the main performer in the show, accompanied by USC music students Rebecca Wood, Kelsey Harrison and Katie Gatch, showed up like regular customers running a weekend errand to buy produce. A few minutes into their shopping though, they began dancing and singing, making the produce section their own stage for about five minutes. Some shoppers looked on with confusion while others stopped and smiled at the peculiar situation unfolding near the vegetables.
“It’s the perfect way to break that barrier between public space and performance space by getting into people’s routines and changing it up,” said Sherry Warren, the executive director of Pocket Productions. “We love the idea of transforming a public space into a performance venue.”
Warren said the idea behind the flash mob was to bring a little color and art into the mundane process of going to the grocery store. It’s not every day a group of people perform a musical for a building full of strangers comparing prices and thumbing through coupon books.
“Our mission is to innovate and collaborate through these public performances,” said Kirill Simin, associate director of Pocket Production. “We’ve always been interested in merging the audience with the performance.”
Despite being kicked out of one store during a performance, most people responded so well to the performance that the group felt like they had gotten their message across.
“We’ve chosen for this particular project to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” said Aaron Pelzek, president of Pocket Productions’ board and director of the grocery store musical endeavor. “I think all of these projects have the same goal. You’re innovating people’s ideas about the art around you. I think that if you can just get people smiling when they are streamlining through their own life of stoicism, then that’s the reason for these projects.”
More projects are in the works for Pocket Productions. Information about other performances and projects can be found at www.pocketproductions.org/contact/ and on the group’s facebook page www.facebook.com/pocketproductions.
Editor's note: This article was corrected June 13th to attribute George Fetner as the composer of the Pocket Productions performance song. The number was inspired by, not taken from, Improv Everywhere's Grocery Store Musical.