Pechakucha – how restrictions and limitations can make the impossible, possible.

Back at the end of 2022 whilst I was still living in York after graduating Uni I attended my first PechaKucha evening, which started me down a path which would change the way I approach creatives and community events forever.

A PechaKucha is a presentation format created in Japan in 2003 by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham – who are actually German and British respectively. They created the format to help the students they lectured in Tokyo to ‘talk less, show more’, with the aim of creating limitations to inspire conciseness and clarity. The original PechaKucha format gives the speaker 20 slides, on which they can only display a single image, and after 20 seconds the slide will automatically move to the next one. In the end, with 20 slides at 20 seconds each, the presenter has only 6 minutes and 40 seconds to get their point across.

While this may seem like a daunting task, the format caught on, traveling across universities, schools, businesses and eventually transforming into the international PechaKucha online community, where one organisation per city around the globe can apply to take on the mantle of regular PechaKucha event host. Their job is then to bring together a diverse community within their city to share their stories through
the PechaKucha format before uploading them onto the online platform for all to see. This was how I was first introduced to PechaKuchas, back in 2022 whilst volunteering with York Creatives who were York’s PechaKucha hosts.

York Creatives, as the name would suggest, are a brilliant collective of passionate creatives determined to connect and support the creative industry in and around York, especially on a grassroots level. They used the PechaKuchas as a way to platform artists and creative businesses – from illustrators to film makers to virtual reality specialists – but after only attending two PechaKucha evenings their usual Event Producer had to step down and the future of the events was uncertain. I was approached as an early career Creative Producer to continue the events, and I was thrilled to give it a go.

However, what I learnt very quickly was that creatives were often too humble and were not interested in the idea of boasting about their amazing journeys and achievements. Public speaking also did not come naturally to many of them and they couldn’t think of anything worse than trying to wrangle their whole creative careers or artistic vision into a single presentation.

But this is where the limitations and restrictions created by Klein and Dytham came into play. Whilst the idea of having to present on their whole creative life seemed impossible, showing them that they just needed to pick 20 images and speak on each of them for only 20 seconds made the task that much more possible. We also gave each PechaKucha evening a theme, a loose thread to tie the different talks together into a cohesive programme, and once again provide a life-line to artists daunted by the need to select what aspect of their work to speak on. This was the selling point which buoyed the confidence of most of my speakers to take part, share their stories, and receive much deserved praise and applause from a small, welcoming community of fellow local creatives.

Blue-sky thinking is all well and good, but sometimes a few limitations can go a long way into making the impossible seem possible. It’s a lesson I have taken with me when creating events or festivals, producing theatre or running rehearsal rooms, or connecting with communities. Restrictions can act as such a useful framework on which to hang the elements of any project, and make even the most far-fetched, blue-sky idea just that more grounded and achievable.

Interested in finding out more about PechaKuchas, or listening to some of the presentations? Check out the online community at https://www.pechakucha.com/

Ione Vaughan,
Connecting Notts Youth Board member