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You’re walking down the street in New York’s Times Square when you hear the loud and pounding beat of dance music.
Suddenly you’re surrounded by dancers, 50 of them, in elaborate, colorful costumes, swaying, jumping and grinding to the beat.
It's as if you’d stepped into a Hollywood musical.
Make that a Bollywood musical.
As it turns out, the dancers were performing the climactic dance scene from "Bollywood Hero,” a new IFC miniseries premiering tonight about a comic actor who flees Hollywood for India because he can’t get a role as a leading man.
To promote the series, IFC staged five flash-mob dance performances around Manhattan earlier this week.
“Bollywood has these dance numbers that are big and really a fun part of our musical miniseries,” says IFC vice president of public relations Marie Stenberg. “We thought it would be really special and exciting to recreate those out there throughout the city.”
The dance was choreographed by “Slumdog Millionaire’s” Longinus Fernandez and performed by New York’s Bollywood Axion dance troupe.
Even if they hadn’t been dancing, the performers would have been hard to miss. Many of the women wore beaded saris in an array of bright colors, big earrings and dozens of bangle bracelets. The men were dressed in bright blue long-sleeved shirts and black pants.
From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday, the dancers performed the same routine at five different locations around Manhattan, chosen because they attract high foot traffic: Union Square, Penn Station, Herald Square, Bryant Park and Military Island on Times Square.
“Hero” stars Chris Kattan, Neha Dhupia, & Pooja Kumar were on hand for the final performance in Times Square, where hundreds of people stopped to watch the demonstration. Street teams handed out “Hero”-branded fans and bags.
IFC posted a video of the dance on YouTube, and several other passersby also posted footage taken on their cell phones or cameras.
The stunt, which was produced by the michael alan group, a non-traditional event and marketing production firm, generated lots of action on Twitter, with bystanders Tweeting about the experience almost as soon as it had begun.
The Associated Press, Reuters and Getty Images also snapped pictures, and at least one New York paper ran a photo of the dancers yesterday.
“There were people coming by in double-decker busses taking photos, and some busses stopped. Cabs were stopping, people in the office buildings were looking out,” Stenberg says. “It was quite a performance, I have to say.”
Kattan has been giving print and radio interviews across the country to promote the miniseries, but this alternative element worked because it really conveyed the mood of the film. It was like taking Manhattan pedestrians and plunking them into the movie itself.
Plus, when 50 people begin dancing in the streets, it’s kind of hard to miss, even in the heart of New York's theater district.
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