TEDxBerlin 2012: "Crossing Borders"
At PEAK, we love good stories, and work with our clients to help them present them in a way that is exciting and engaging for a large audience.
A red-letter day in our calendar is the TEDxBerlin – an offshoot from the famous TED conference, which has taken place annually since 1984 in Long Beach and Oxford in front of about 1,000 attendees, and is often booked out a year in advance.
TED – A worldwide community
TEDxBerlin works like TED – the goal is to disseminate ideas in technology (T), entertainment (E), and design (D) in an inspiring and easily accessible way. The x in TEDx denotes the independently organised conferences now held in several cities around the world, enabling ideas to be spread even more quickly, in several places at once. Famous TED talks have been given, for example, by Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Isabel Allende, and Hans Rosling. In Berlin and Hamburg, the format is determined by our partners at red onion, a Berlin communications agency.
Speakers begin preparing months in advance
We at PEAK help with the German TEDx format by preparing many of the speakers for their 18-minute appearances on stage.
PEAK director Ole Tillmann assists individual speakers with their preparations, builds up a storyline over several sessions with them, and coaches them to tell their stories not only with words but with their bodies, too.
For instance, he works with methods from actor training, which help speakers to use correct breathing, even when stressed, to build up and maintain an arc of suspense, and to make the story more lively through gestures. Through this speaker coaching, stories that were already good become the little gems that make TED talks so compelling and memorable.
Inspiring talks at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt
The last TEDxBerlin took place late November 2012 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with a motto of "Crossing Borders". In exciting, humorous, and moving stories, fifteen German and international speakers related how they had transcended their own bodily, emotional, or technological limits to re-invent their own lives. Some speakers illustrated not only the individual, but also the social, consequences of limits.
Thomas Petzold, for example, who researches culture and innovation at the WZB, refreshingly demonstrated the immense significance of language in a world dominated by technology. Thomas Petzold was prepared for his TEDx talk by Ole Tillmann; PEAK also made the link to illustrator Sven-Norman Bommes, who visually animated Petzold’s story. A captivating talk that shows that Google Maps sometimes isn’t everything.
Andrea Kolb – founder of ABURY – overcomes cultural and economic hurdles with her company. ABURY internationally sells fashionable leather bags that are produced in the ancient Moroccan embroidery tradition. Each bag is unique, tells an individual life story, and generates income for local craftspeople. The bags are as authentic as the story Andrea Kolb has to tell.
PEAK assists speakers at TEDx in telling their stories and optimising them for presentation to a large audience. We can’t get enough of the creative sessions with the speakers, and are already looking forward to our next engagement for the two-day TEDxBerlin in September 2013.
More information about the event: www.tedxberlin.de
