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The Art of Performance

May 2010

A Passionate story

A friend sent me a video of chef Dan Barber's TED talk, "How I Fell in Love with a Fish" (www.ted.com).

She knows Dan. "He's so shy in person,” she said, “that at first I didn't know who this man in the video was."

I agree. I've seen Dan Barber on "Top Chef" and "Top Chef Masters," where he didn't seem comfortable and, probably as a consequence, didn't get as much face time as the more voluble chefs. Yet in this 2010 video, and in a 2008 video that's available, he's talking to large audiences with apparent ease.

I wasn't that interested in his subject–sustainable production of food. I grew up on a farm; I've watched cows and pigs and chickens being slaughtered; I've shoveled manure and slopped pigs and been pecked by hens that didn't want me to take their eggs; and I couldn't wait until I was old enough to leave all that behind me.

But Dan Barber is mesmerizing. Whenever I went back to study the public speaking techniques he was using, I had trouble turning him off.

What makes this chef such a great speaker? The first answer is passion. He cooks 3-Michelin-star-worthy food. He travels the world to find the best food, and to study how that food is produced. He writes (and writes well) about food. He's in love with food.

Second, he tells a story. The "Fish" talk consists of two fish stories, with a coda in which he pleads for the production methods that produced the second fish. No premise statement at the beginning, just two love stories. I had guessed, before I went back to check, that the ending, where he does state his premise, was three minutes long at most. No, it was five minutes, out of a twenty-minute talk. But because it flowed logically from the stories he had told, it seemed more like the short moral at the end of an Aesop fable. In the 2008 video he has two pages of notes on the lectern; in the 2010 video he has no notes and no lectern. Just himself on a bare stage with a few visuals. The visuals he uses are mood-setting, rather than illustrative of a particular point he's making. Gorgeous clips of flying flamingos appear as he talks about the ecology of a Spanish fish farm. "Appear" is the right word here, for they do not seem to be timed to coincide with a particular statement, but to evoke an emotional response that will eventually underline his message.

Moral: You don't need power points if you're in love with your subject and tell us a story.



Any thoughts about performance that you’d like to share?
Any performance problems that you’d like to see addressed in this column?
Let me know about them at croan1@triad.rr.com or at my blogspot