BettaKultcha goes Festival! Alison Pilling (@AnarchicAli) has a great time at Magic Loungeabout, and doesn’t even mention her own bettakultcha performance . . .
Well those BettaKultcha guys have been at it again, trying out the established format in a new setting. For newcomers to the BK idea, presenters talk for five minutes about pretty much anything with the help of 20 slides which change every 15 seconds. The key is passion, a good topic and timing. So how would this go down with festival-goers at the MagicLoungeabout festival?
MagicLoungeabout is in its third year and set in the fabulous grounds of Broughton Hall just the other side of Skipton. If you can imagine a mini-Woodstock transported forty-odd years into the future and set in well-heeled North Yorkshire, you won’t be far off. By Saturday evening the veggie falafel wraps were sold out and it was standing room only in the shiatsu tent, but if you’re a cynical old carnivore don’t let put you off! Headline act on Friday night was the brilliant Nile Rodgers with Chic showing off the whole range of their song-writing as well as performing ability. Saturday was graced by dance music giants Inner City finishing with The Charlatans on Sunday. The Festival also show-cased ‘next big thing’ Lucy Rose, electro-pop duo Chew Lips and lots of others that I’m nowhere near cool enough to tell you about. There’s lots of activities for children, and fringe acts as weird as rhubarb thrashing and one-legged tug of war.
Anyway BettaKultcha . . . Rich and Ivor were introduced to the Festival via PR man Adam Burns, this weekend debuting with a rant about printed newspapers being the real source of news, not this new internet rubbish. Regular Kultcharites may remember Adam from his ‘F*** you, Dad’ random slide challenge . . . you had to be there . . . BK was given five separate slots in the Food for Thought tent covering four hours, which allowed for 32 presentations and a handful of random slide challenges. Most presenters were people who had performed before covering a wide range of topics.
I can honestly say that every last one was great so it would be wrong to have favourites but to give you a flavour, Friday covered Kate Booth’s brilliant critique of Willy Wonka’s factory in the 21st century, Charlie Hindmarsh’s saw-playing, and kicked off with Lee Jackson celebrating Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the world wide web. Luckily this was early enough for Danny Boyle to rush off and add this fact to the Olympics opening ceremony. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, you know. Friday also saw a couple of random slide challenges including one from 11-year-old Isabel from Manchester. The highlight was her gawping at a slide of the Jackson Five – ‘who are they, then?’
Saturday started early . . . too early. A 10am start became a nearly 11am start whilst they waited for hung-over festival goers to find it and a Red Bull-branded lorry to empty the chemical toilets . . . just saying . . . We managed to stop Ivor going off down an overly scatological route, and built up a crowd.
The morning sessions covered the best professional Yorkshireman, why we’re daft to enter competitions, quantum physics and the history of On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘at (first referenced in ancient Egypt and now played worldwide). Rory Scammell told us about the hurdy gurdy and later treated us to a remarkable rendition of Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric? before ending with a Hendrixy star spangled banner flourish.
The later session began at half six. It was clear that BettaKultcha was beginning to develop a following but the trick with festivals is to capture people who might get distracted by another activity and miss out. Having a bar in the tent and the odd shower of rain helped to catch some but having tame saw and hurdy gurdy players seemed to help! This is definitely something to consider for next time, however, together with a plan of how to use the presentation subjects to build up the audience over the weekend. Sometimes you need humour, sometimes a great story, and the edgier ones could be saved for an older audience later in the day, as I know that a number of presenters struggled with the concept of ‘family-friendly material’!
Having said that the Saturday evening built well starting with Peg Alexander’s frightening cake-peddler story, cycling, and Back to the Future predictions. The event was brought to a close with Nigel Vardy on hats, Lydia Slack’s experiences in Swaziland and Maria Millionaire’s tribute to the beautiful Ryan Gosling. One of BettaKultcha’s strengths is that it is entirely amateur performed by volunteers, but now and again you see talent, like Maria’s, where you truly hope they can make a career of it.
One of the lovely things about this weekend in particular was that, despite all the very real reservations people have had about the Olympics, the opening ceremony showed that the Arts is very much alive and well in the UK. BettaKultcha has its own role in that. I love the idea that literally anyone can have their five minutes of fame. The festival experience has enabled those people to have a wider audience and in parallel the BettaKabaret concept has found a way to mix amateur enthusiasts with more established acts.
The trick therefore for future ventures of this kind is to ensure that it never goes too far from its roots in the community or ever appears so polished that it is too daunting to people on the verge of stepping into the spotlight. BettaKultcha succeeded this weekend in bringing the idea to hundreds more people, informing and entertaining, but future BK festival-going needs to find a way to encourage wider participation. We had two or three volunteers for random slides and a few people tried their hand at the cup and spoon trick, but there is potential to expand involvement and make it an established and expected feature at events of this kind.
Nevertheless this was a great start and thoroughly enjoyable. When’s the next?!
You can follow @bettakultcha or check the website bettakultcha.com
There’s some photos of the weekend and a full list of presenters and their Twitter names on my site at AnarchicAli.com
Thanks for the review Alison. From my point of view the festival followed the elegant story arc of the Leeds phenomenon that is Bettakultcha — slowly at first with a small audience but building as more people hear about the magic until the final show was rammed with curious and fascinated people. Had we had a slot on the Sunday I’m sure that we would have been turning them away from the heaving tent.
I think your last point is an interesting one, the ‘amateur’ status of the event is a definite appeal for our audience and as the venues get bigger will we lose that sense of home grown talent? My personal view is that if we maintain the strict format of 20 slides, 15 seconds then we can retain the ‘anyone can have a go’ aspect of the event despite larger venues. Admittedly, if we extended the time each presenter had on stage then it would become a different animal. Fortunately we have created that particular animal in the form of BettaKabaret so unbounded talent can flourish in a more professional environment.
And as someone who has done an open mic at BettaKabaret I’m sure you can testify to the sense of this approach.
Whatever it is that gets people enthusiastic about Bettakultcha, we ain’t about to change! And can I publicly thank all the BK presenters at The Magic Loungeabout as, without them, we wouldn’t have had a show.
I suppose the question is whether we can encourage people to have a go then and there, for which there are technical challenges in getting the slides together, whether we give volunteers some slides in advance to practice – an unrandom slide challenge!, or invite presenters via the ticket-buying for the festival. Or all 3!
But you’re absolutely right, the message gradually picked up and had we had the tent to ourselves the whole weekend we would have been stealing lots of people from the main stage by the end!
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