Pecha Kucha Atlanta Vol. 29. May 22. Elevator Factory, 437 Memorial Drive, Suite A2. pechakucha.org/cities/atlanta
Insider tip
Pecha Kucha Atlanta holds a special event every year at the Atlanta Cycling Festival (June 11-18 in 2016). "We think of them as 'half-volumes,'" Ward says. "The format will be basically the same, with eight to 10 presenters on bicycling themes."atlantacyclingfestival.com
How much could you change the world in under 7 minutes?
This story originally appeared in the May/June 2016 edition of Living Intown Magazine.
Pecha Kucha Atlanta is a group that gathers people for light, entertaining presentations that answer exactly that question.
Pecha Kucha (Japanese: ペチャクチャ chit-chat) is a presentation style in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each, six minutes and 40 seconds in total. Volume 28 in Atlanta was held Feb. 21 at Elevator Factory on Memorial Dr.
The presentations have covered refugee outreach and coffee trucks, homelessness and depression, being a six-time 'Jeopardy!' winner and Atlanta street fashion. The order of topics at each meeting is decided in secret by Pecha Kucha Atlanta oraganizers. The participants are expected to be ready to hit the stage when their names are called.
Since 2013, Kevin Ward has been an organizer of PK Atlanta, one of hundreds of similar Pecha Kucha chapters worldwide. He sees Atlanta’s PK Nights, held quarterly, as chances to build bridges between local communities. “What I want the audience to get out of them is a sense of interconnectedness,” says Ward, who manages Midtown Art Cinema as his day job. “Atlanta’s a big city and very cliquey — if you don’t know the right people, it’s hard to get into certain things. PK can be an avenue to get in.”
The Pecha Kucha format was created in 2003 by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of the Tokyo-based Klein-Dythan architecture firm to force their architects to give concise presentations. The format proved popular and transitioned to other subjects and across the world.
In Atlanta, Ward and his fellow organizers find and approve speakers after some light coaching. The coaching can be useful when preparing for a format as demanding as PK.
"Developing this presentation was a challenge," says Ama McKinley, college professor and ordained Orisha priestess, who presented "The Orisha Pantheon: Badass Ancient Gods in the Modern World" at PK 28. "Squeezing indigenous religious tenets, the historical implications of the transatlantic slave trade, geography lessons, personal accounts, deity introductions and pop culture occurrences into six minutes was no small feat."
While local, monologue-based performance events like Write Club are built on storytelling, anecdotes and literary-style epiphanies, Pecha Kucha seems to hinge more on social issues and concepts, with personal stories providing entry points.
Some prove particularly wrenching, and Ward points to Emiline Renz's presentation in December of 2014. The prosaic title "Changing Perspectives on Distracted Driving" belied her powerful subject matter, as she recounted how a motorist struck her father while he was bicycling. Renz showed a slide of her father in a hospital bed after being hit by a car, hooked up to multiple machines. "I spent 13 days in the hospital looking at this," Renz said, tearing up. "You have 20 seconds, and I can't look at it."
But she used that tragedy to pivot to the problem of distracted driving, relating the Center for Disease Control’s statistic that nine people in the United States are killed each day in accidents involving drivers distracted by text messages and other devices. Renz ended with a call to start a campaign against the practice, comparable to Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
A measure of a Pecha Kucha night’s success is the way one speaker can inspire potential new ones — or at least provoke some lively chit-chat.
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