“quick cals”: thousands will engage in unison movement before OSU games

Ok, I am generally not a football fan in any way, but I can’t help but be interested in this. The new OSU Football Coach, Urban Meyer, just sent an email to the entire OSU student body with a link to a youtube video. In it, he announces a new tradition: “quick cals”. These are a serious of claps, vocalizations, and hand gestures, practiced in a low, bent-torso, wide-legged stance to be performed by the Buckeyes team and ALL fans exactly 23 minutes before each game start time.

Other than that the ‘wave’ has always been one of the only redeeming factors of sporting events for me, I’ve avoided thinking too much about how the world of sports and my own interests in mass movement culture are connected. But this really catches my interest. It is going to be remarkable; the Horseshoe (OSU Stadium) holds more than 100,000 people, and I can imagine others watching around the city joining in through their various screens. (By the way, I once lived there, in the shoe, in a windowless dorm underneath the stands, fighting through the already drunk football crowds each saturday morning to head to my dance rehearsals!) I can imagine the sense of belonging, and of excitement, that participating in these vigorous and forceful movements will produce in the participants. I find it exciting to think about the way a group performing this way together could gel, and perhaps a bit nervous about what the performance might make possible for this group.

The Buckeyes are such an incredibly important social, economic and cultural force  here in this area. It is important to almost everyone that they do well. Surely this new tradition is seen as a way to bolster fan loyalty and enrich fan identity. Here is the arena in popular culture where bodies are brought out of hiding, acknowledged a little more actively for their role in producing culture. There is so much more that could be written about this “quick cal” routine and its potential for social formation, a comparison of this to other mass gestural routines and their accompanying cultural traits, or an analysis of the movements in the “quick cal” in terms of Laban Movement Analysis, or about the growing use of video as a system for communicating movement to masses of people, as a “score”, in my book. . . but I haven’t got time. So I will pose a question. The first Buckeyes Game is this Saturday, September 1, 2012. Will you ‘Quick Cal’?

As for me, I’m on the fence.