Dance To The Google Beat

The dancers doing their thing at Makola.

Some of the onlookers described it as ‘a guerrilla dance attack’ and watched with a mix of surprise and excitement as dancers in colourful Google Trader-inscribed T-shirts took over sections of streets in Accra for brief periods.

For about four minutes at each location last Thursday, the 109 dancers with some help from the police to keep portions of the streets free, lunged into choreographed movements put together by former national dance champion, Paa T.

The dancers pitched their brief camps at Makola, Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Osu Oxford Street, Akuafo Hall at the University of Ghana, Legon and the Accra Mall.

The whole affair was to create public awareness of the introduction of Google Trader in this country. Google Trader is a free SMS-based service specifically designed to suit the mobile needs of Africans. It is a marketplace where people can visit to search for, buy and sell all sorts of goods and services.

Panji Anoff, project manager for the awareness creation venture, said the dancers were recruited from various dance groups across Accra and they worked extremely hard over a short period for the attention-grabbing exercise.

“We felt a sudden splash of colour and choreographed movements would draw attention to what we had to say and we were largely successful,” he said. “Everything was filmed so a much larger public can later see what happened. It was a visually exciting spectacle.”

He added that with the Google Trader service, people would be able to search for and trade products and services like crops, cars, electronics or hunt for jobs straight from their mobile phones.