Baptism By Pecha Kucha

Last night the audience was granted permission to misbehave. And like high school students subjected to an hour of tiresome gibberish from an ineffective teacher, the crowd did just that.

When they became bored, the audience members, in the middle of a presentation, held their own conversations or checked their email. Some went out for a drink while others simply yelled at the stage. Nothing jars the senses of the speaker like hearing — “Get to the point” — followed by laughter.

This is the wonderful world of Pecha Kucha, pronounced pee-chock-cha, and Indianapolis real estate mogul Joe Shoemaker aptly described it as “Speech 101 meets PowerPoint meets Gong Show meets Open Mic poetry meets too much wine.” We felt that it was an artisan Showtime at the Apollo, minus the hook.

Pecha Kucha — Japanese for ‘chit-chat’ — came from an inspired moment in Tokyo six years ago when young designers established the unique brand of performance art as a way to meet, network and display their work in public. The presentations were concise, the event moved rapidly and the audience was able to react and participate. It was a hit and it spread.

So last night in the Toby Theater at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, we caught our first glimpse. We had been in a meeting with the wonderful Architects for Humanity earlier in the evening and the members convinced us that it was a great event. That was confirmed when we arrived and found the venue to be sold out. Yet we did manage to find two tickets.

The schedule called for 12 presenters, who each had 20 slides — and 20 seconds per slide — to sell their idea to the crowd, but they needed to be prepared for an onslaught. The winning presentation was to get a handsome reward from the Central Indiana Community Foundation.

In his introduction, CICF President Brian Payne explained the award. “We don’t just give $10,000 to an artist with no strings attached. If we did, they’d wind up in jail … The money goes to help them fund their project.”

From the very start, the crowd was hysterically restless. The first presenter, perhaps startled by the crowd reaction, muttered, “Oh, this is great.”

The second performer, who proposed a coordinated system of 26 giant letter bicycle racks throughout Indianapolis, was heckled from one side of the room and stopped to ask, “Is that the same guy over and over again?”

In the end, the prize went to Laura Henderson, the founder of the Indianapolis Winter Farmers Market, whose presentation “Growing Place: The Slow Food Edible Garden at the White River State Park” was hard to deride.

As we left, we chuckled at the possibility of applying Pecha Kucha to education, knowing that it would identify those most ready and able to handle a classroom. Not long ago, also at a demonstration at the IMA, Javier Barrera of the Latino Youth Collective told us, “A teacher’s job is to sell knowledge to the kids and most of them need to work on their marketing skills.”

A little Pecha Kucha could certainly help.

If you have other ways to apply Pecha Kucha for the greater good, let us know in comments below.