The dust has settled from last week's TED conference, and the show to see may not have been the main stage with a $7500 price tag. For non-millionaires, the show of the year was the beautifully unstructured by-donation extravaganza benefitting the Vancouver Food Bank last Wednesday sparked and hosted by Amanda Palmer, the crowd-sourcing punk cabaret scamp formerly of Dresden Dolls.
Word started circling last Tuesday after Palmer posted a preliminary performer list on her blog. She had "at least one Geoff Berner, one Bora Yoon, one famous Harvard professor, and one astronaut who plays guitar." If there was even a glimmer of a chance I'd get to see Chris Hadfield, the man who collided space and '70s glam rock into an expression of pure joy when he played "Space Oddity" while actually floating around in space, it was worth getting in a line for.
The line from The Vogue (who generously donated their venue) started shortly before 3:00pm. By 5:30 the line reached the end of the sidewalk, and by 8:30, when they started handing out wristbands for entry to the first 1100 cheerfully chilly people, the line had wrapped all the way around the block.Vancouver's own Orkestar Slivovica Balkan Brass Band marched outside to entertain portions of the masses for the last hour outside, and continued inside as those with the coveted yellow wristbands piled into the warm belly of the Vogue.
There was a full unstructured roster of Ted 2014 speakers as well as local and international guests for a good cause. Here are a few highlights:
Neil Gaiman, author of the stuff dreams are made of such as the Sandman series, was the first surprise guest. Gaiman sang an adorably awkward version of Leon Payne’s “Psycho” and read one of his stories off his iPad about clever ducks.
Chris Kluwe, former football player, author, and outspoken supporter of LGTB rights, spoke a bit about what he said he really wanted to focus on at his TED talk, which was the need for empathy to evolve alongside technology. He also spoke about the potential technology and augmented reality has for developing empathy by putting bullies in the place of their victims to help teach empathy to children.
Del Harvey, VP of Trust & Safety at Twitter, took the stage to inform us that she sees all of your tweets, even all of your embarrassing drunk tweets: "You know the tweet you sent then deleted that was only on there for a second, the one you thought no one saw? Well, I saw it."
If brainy talks weren't enough to keep your mind aflutter, a slew of musicians took their turn on the stage. Jason Webley, an accordion-weilding, darkly optimistic musician with a cheeky sense of humor (and the other half of Evelyn Evelyn with Palmer) sang a song directed at a giraffe farm owner who refused his request for a pet giraffe. Geoff Berner had a whole audience yelling "f*ck the police" (which is not unusual for his performances, yet fun every time.) Imogen Heap (with her keytar that Air Canada broke and Gorilla Glue fixed) transformed the audience into her backup singers and rounded out the audience-participation for the evening.
Imogen Heap
Amy Cuddy's research on how body language affects shapes who you are has changed the lives of countless women and introverts (myself included, as I happen to be both.) Cuddy and Palmer practiced power poses with the whole theatre, and upped the power to a new level by standing on a chairs that Palmer insisted be chaotically distributed across the stage to offset any sense of order.
Sarah Kay, spoken word poet, performed a powerful piece inspired by Nelson Mandella. She was followed by TED fellows, including experimental musician Bora Yoon, and Pakistani percussive guitarist Usman Riaz who both filled the room again with music and soundscapes.
The last performer was astronaut, author, space-tweeter, singer and songwriter Chris Hadfield who sang us his own playful song about being in space, and then his own version of Space Oddity, (for example, changing "though I've gone one hundred thousand miles" to "one hundred million miles," adding cheekily "and I have!") Not even half the audience brutally missing the clapping cues could take away from the performance. (I completely teared up like a teenage fangirl.)
After his performance Hadfield sat to the side of the stage and smiled for a few fan selfies while Palmer sang "Astronaut" to him. It was a beautifully strange end to a beautifully strange evening.
