Some friends and I attended Sydney Festival’s ‘First Night’ last night and it was massive. Huge. Over 200,000 people in Sydney and half the city blocked off.
And it wasn’t just entertaining. There were lessons in simplicity which made people go “Wow!” and “Why?”
Firstly, not enough simplicity. They launched “The Sydney”, a dance sequence they hoped was going to take off. But it didn’t. Great idea, and I’m all over dance sequences (see Nutbush, Penguin and the Gwithian Tequila Dance for those in the know). But I lost interest in this one. It was just too complicated. It had about 20 sepearate moves. That made it hard to teach, hard to learn, hard to do and hard to enjoy. Half the length would have been better.
(My wife disagrees. She thinks the crowd got into it but we were too cramped in the ‘mosh’ pit.)
Secondly, amazing simplicity. At the domain still buzzing from the Cat Empire’s set we tried to connect up with some other friends. Other people where waving arms and talking on mobiles, but I had another idea. I remember Keith Ahern telling me about an iPhone app that scrolls words across the screen in big letters.
- Open up App Store on iPhone.
- Type Marque (didn’t even spell it right)
- First result looked right. Install.
- It downloads, installs, I run it and can use it in under a minute.
- I type in “George!!” and hit go.
- Holding it above my head people around me start gasping and whispering “Cool!”.
- “Mick”, my friend yells from 20 metres and finds me super fast.
I was awash in a glow of wonderful working technology. It’s so cool when it works.
Don’t you just love simplicity.