This flash mob performance is a joint idea by Amanda and I (Gwendolyn). We were exploring the ideas of script / scene / actors and seeing how different actors would change the dynamic of the scene, or the expression of the line.

Our initial idea was to take a scene from a movie which consisted of dialogue, and having the lines on tablets or phones which is being passed down in a line for the person opposite to deliver the line.

But we were worried that lines from a movie would be too recognisable and the participants would deliver them in a very predictable way (i.e., how it is delivered originally in the movie). We decided to search for English dialogue and we found ‘sample’ conversations used to teach English to non-English speakers. These were dialogue that were essentially supposed to be small talk but had strangely formal tones to teach students grammar or sentence structure. We thought this dialogue would work well as the lines were generic and plain enough and open to interpretation. Here was the dialogue we ended up using:

(https://i.calameoassets.com/140602153945-fe2e058218229fde86f87bfc978ea693/large.jpg)

(https://en.islcollective.com/english-esl-worksheets/grammar/present-perfect-simple-tense/present-perfect-simple-tense-experience-dialogues-speaking-p/109422)

(https://en.islcollective.com/english-esl-worksheets/grammar/present-perfect-tense/present-perfect-dialogues-how-long/exercise/110581)

Instead of having people repeat the dialogue down a line, we wanted to create a human echo chamber.

We printed out the above dialogue and cut them into strips.

The instructions were given to the participants as follows:

1. Stand in a circle.
2. We will pass the first person a slip of dialogue which they will read to the next person.
3. The next person has to relay that dialogue to the person next to them, and so on, passing the line down the circle.
4. You can translate it the same way you heard it, or change the way the line is being expressed.
5. When the line reaches the third person in the circle, a new line will be fed to the first person in the circle.

We thought that we would be interesting as the dialogue chosen reveals new information in each line and so as the dialogue was being passed down, the participants would get to know bits of information in real time. We also wanted to hear the effect of the same line being echoed, passed down in different ways and yet the content of the dialogue is unchanged.

Here is the final video: