Vote To Decide Who Will Win The Great “Museum Dance Off”?

image via youtube screen capture

Odds are you don’t think of a museum as a great place to bust a move. Observe fine art? Sure. Experience historic treasures? Absolutely. Interactive science? Yup. But dancing? Not likely.

That all changes this week, as voting opens on the “Museum Dance Off,” an international competition featuring docents, researchers, and exhibit fabricators, all boogeying down for the right to declare their museum the dance off champion.

The competition, now in its second year, is the brainchild of insider reaction-gif site When You Work At A Museum, and features twenty eight competing crews from institutions around the world. To participate, each museum has submitted a video of their staff dancing to everything from pop classics like Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance” to museum-centric spoofs of The Lego Movie’s “Everything Is Awesome.” There’s even a New Orleans jazz marching band in the mix. Each museum brings a unique vibe to their entry video, showcasing just what makes their particular institution special.

Just as varied as the musical selections are the types and locations of the competing museums, themselves. Washington, DC’s National Museum Of American History tries their hand at MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This”:

...as do the staff at the Zanabazar Fine Arts Museum, of Ulaanbataar, Mongolia:

The competition is broken down into eight days (4/20 – 4/29) of voting, with either three or four of the competing museums going head to head against one another each day. As per When You Work At A Museum, the voting rules are fairly straightforward:

A – Anyone can vote, from anywhere in the world.

B – Voting for each match-up will be open for 24 hours. All timing will be synced to the Eastern Time Zone.

C – Visit whenyouworkatamuseum.com each day, Mon-Fri, at 8am to vote for your favorite museum dance off video. Voting for each match-up will begin at 8am EDT each day, and close at 7:59am EDT the following day.

C – You don’t have to be a Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter user to vote. You’ll just need to visit our website and then vote using the embedded poll. You will need to fill out a captcha to cast your vote but no registration or log-in is required.

E – Encourage people to vote for their video by facebooking, tweeting, tumblring, emailing, etc. You don’t have to wait for your museum’s turn on deck; it’s fine to promote it any time! Use the hashtag #museumdanceoff2 to spread the word.

The full list of participating museums and their entry dance-off videos is here.

Voting has already begun, so all that’s left for you to do is head over to When You Work At A Museum, watch the day’s competing entries, and pick your favorite. And once you’ve done that, why not head over to your nearest art, science, history, or specialty museum and check out their latest exhibit? Because while watching their hilarious lip-synch dancing videos is great, most museums have even better stuff to offer once you actually walk through the doors.

[via smithsonian.com]