One Saturday, with the leftover of the summer heat, Roppongi freezes.
Tokyo Midtown, or Galleria, the representative of Roppongi shopping street.
It’s got high ceilings and spacious hallways, a perfect space for those in search of good-quality. The comforting space of “WA”.
There, 86 students came to a sudden standstill on 4th October in 2008.
Hello, I am Masanari Takao, the leader of “Frozen Tokyo Midtown”.
On behalf of Incredible Penguin, I would like to thank all those who participated in this project.
We have never experienced this kind of mission before. It was the first time for us to try it as an entire group. We, Incredible Penguin, were greatly inspired by an organization, “Improv Everywhere”, and founded in June 2008 as a student organization to pursue something interesting, amusing and entertaining.
In September, we did the pre-first mission as a trial at a beer-garden, but it ended up vainly.
After that, we decided to do “Frozen” in Tokyo Midtown, a project we have had in mind since our foundation, and I was elected as the leader for it.
I had just started my university life and suddenly, I had to handle almost 100 students. It was great pressure for me. Failure was unacceptable. However, my excitement was unexpectable.
Other members helped me greatly especially in the field of tape recording and in assembling agents and thanks to them I was able to concentrate on the management for the performance.
On 4th October, I got out of bed drowsily as we had had meeting on Skype till three o’clock in the midnight. At two in the afternoon, filming crews did the final check of the location and an hour later we had a check for the staffs. Agents started to appear at quarter to four. When the explanation to those agents ended it was already quarter to five, fifteen minutes before the performance. We dismissed the agents and headed for Garelia.
The agents were already there. They stood by and waited.
The hum of conversations… The tapping of footsteps…
Set, go.
Everything stopped. Others kept moving, but we stopped.
Everybody was watching us. We felt their eyes.
A lady patted on my shoulder, as if to say what the hell are you doing!
I heard some English. What are they saying? They said “Frozen, frozen!” They may have known the original performance. They seemed to be entertained.
A man came across, then he stopped! He seemed inspired and he copied us!
Five minutes seemed like a split second. With a burst of applause, our mission ended.
We went back to where we assembled the agents and took group photos.
I must say, this mission was thoroughly successful. We would love to keep producing more entertainment, so stay with us! We will not let you down.