It’s a form of anti-TED talk.
A genre of performance with roots in conceptual art.
Existing since the 1960s as a subgenre of performance, the lecture-performance or performance-lecture has its roots in the performance and conceptual art of the 1960s, and balances on the boundary between art and academia.
The lecture space becomes a performance space but fuses other disciplines
It’s a type of presentation that goes beyond the academic format of the lecture. Artists (not only visual or performance) use the lecture to turn it into a performance space which fuses aspects of drama and of visual and other media disciplines.
Hybrid it borrows heavily from anywhere else
It’s hybrid nature then often expresses in borrowed hybrid elements such as storytelling, the mass media, internet, adverts, slogans, images, and technology.
It acts on multi-levels to juxtapose and contrast
The performance lecture at its best has varied functions and elements operating on multiple levels. These can form a visual rhetoric or performative actions and artistic non-sequiturs Techniques of advertising and propaganda or more straight forward education lectures and slides are used to explore the relationship between the image and the text or between consensus and the facts, or contrasting ideas or narratives.
It questions the audience/performer/viewer divisions and plays with interaction
In its artistic investigations the relationship of perception and of understanding, the audience and the performer and performance ideas can all come under scrutiny.
In that sense it is nothing like a Ted talk. It’s almost an anti-Ted Talk.
A TED talk gives you an idea and a smooth talker and tells you it’s the truth.
A performance-lecture gives you a part-idea that you have to complete, challenges you to assess its truth, your truth and the performers truth and like all good theatre can leave you activated and different from when you started.
An early influence on this genre has to be considered John Cage and his work Lecture on Nothing (see below) which may be considered performance art or poetry or music of sorts.
Robert Wilson staged a theatrical version around 2012. Cage himself gave the lecture around 1949.
In any case from the experimental poets and performers has come this cross-genre form. It toys with more questions and answers and tends to critique all sorts of things. Not a mass media genre and less popular in . the UK - it has distant cousins now in stand up comedy and even YouTube performances to a distant degree.
Here’s a review of a recent Berlin lecture performance.
Contemplating other forms of performance for my sustainability arguments, this type of form seemed to suit and hence Thinking Bigly was created.
Further reads: Check out my £10K in microgrants for individuals looking to make positive impact.
A blog on listening to legendary theatre agent, Mel Kenyon.
My Op-Ed in the Financial Times (My Financial Times opinion article) about asking long-term questions surrounding sustainability and ESG.
A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.