In April, Capitol Improv embarked on its most daring mission yet. A small team of highly-trained agents assembled to take the National Mall by musical storm. What follows is an account filled with intrigue, and tourists.

The Mission: to create a Stomp-inspired musical spectacle and surprise unsuspecting tourists.

In March, we sent out a call for musicians to get involved in a small, secret mission going down in the height of Cherry Blossom tourist season. We got together to practice weekends in advance, and picked out instruments like tupperware, coolers, trash cans and books. Everything looked like it belonged, and we hid in plain sight.

On the day of the event, we took our places, one by one and in groups, blending in with other visitors. Then a “janitor” with a trash can rolled up, and started the bass beat. As others joined in, we turned heads and got pictures taken of the performance by surprised onlookers. We even got some amazed applause.

While we’re putting a full-length video together of the performances, here’s a Behind The Scenes with some previews:

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The Mission: A barn dance taking place in the newly-opened “Barnes Dance”, which is a pedestrian crossing whereby people may cross through the entire intersection all at once, with cars totally stopped. Chinatown has some of the busiest intersections in DC, with tourists, businesspeople and the weekend crowd all converging on a Friday evening as we danced through.

Despite some heavy summer showers before and after the hoe-down, our group assembled, dressed in straw hats, plaid and their best shit-kickers. The crossing guards assigned to the intersection laughed as the group first entered the “barnes dance,” and onlookers stopped to snap a quick picture.

We did a few different turns through the intersection and even had a few people join in. Add photos to our flickr pool if you got some good shots! Go to Flickr

No traffic regulations were violated in the making of this video.

For those of you not familiar with Survive DC, we’ve found an old dusty video of how to run and survive in the race! We decided to post it to Youtube so you can see it too!

Enjoy:

Hope to see everyone May 15th. Event kicks off at 7PM on DuPont Circle!!!