KVT – PechaKucha Draws the Crowd
KVT has a belly laugh or three at the Cinematheque
Apparently when it began in Japan in 2003, PechaKucha was invented as a sounding board and forum for go-ey and innovative designers. Now we all know that most young, enthusiastic and intensly creative and artistic designer types just can’t shut up. Give them a power point and they’ll wax on for tedious hours…..so apparently the originators allowed each talker 20 power point slides and a time allotment of 20 seconds per slide.
The idea spread world wide and gradually the initial designer concept gave way to presentations by ANYONE…and PechaKucha rapidly became a cult type event in many cities throughout the world.
Now I can imagine that given creative talkers (funny, emotive, dramatic, whatever) some PechaKucha shows would be unmissable and you’d have crowds lined up around the block to get a ticket. Even Hanoi had a crowd, so dense that you wondered where all these mainly youthful western types hide during the daylight hours….I guess a couple or two were there for the buzz of being anywhere in a like type crowd.
The first presenter, a well known Vietnamese composer and musician, gave a really good flowing, funny yet provocative presentation about one of his albums and popular Vietnamese music in general. He surmounted language barriers and was perfectly rehearsed so that his patter didn’t falter.
The Hawaian shirts slides of a native French speaker were deliciously funny and quirky and could have been the hit of the season anywhere in the Pecha Kucha world. His repartee would have been scintillating in French.
A western musician did a nice thing by making it bilingual and his and his accomplice’s presentation was suitably as slow and mechanical as an electric transformer’s would be if personified and voiced.
By far my favorite part of the night was Lolo Lazar’s screening of 2 of his short films from the 1990’s during interval. They were Monty Python gone Gallic and certainly need more exposure. The last one was a wild-cap, belly-laugh hoot. Certainly needs more screenings to zany people who like to roar with laughter.
I guess that the motto in comedian Tom Lehrer’s very old and famous hit ‘The Boy Scouts’ Marching Song’ should be at the forefront of every PechaKucha presenter’s mind. Tri Minh, the first one up to the mike gave a perfect example of it and he was perfectly….prepared.
I’ll be a keen audience member at the next PechaKucha because the one or two gems that sparkle are worth being part of the cult.
| Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below. |
The concept of PechaKucha is interesting in the sense of visual sociology, or how we communicate through images.
Saying something about the images by crossing the language barriers was another interesting aspect of the event.
In my view most of the presentations mentioned in the above article were enjoyble, simply because they were transcending multilingual speech through image.