BLOG – Photos From Last Night’s ‘Literary Death Match’ Storytelling Smackdown


Highbrow met lowbrow as literature met game show last night during HK’s first ‘Literary Death Match‘. The story-telling format, direct from LA, debuted at The Fringe Club pitting local performers against each other alongside a panel of 3 judges.

It was presented by Death Match founder Adrian Todd Zuniga

The show has now been launched in 50 countries around the world. Last night’s performers included best-selling author Matthew Harrison

…Storyteller extraordinaire Lynne Kirk…

…Author and martial arts expert Bey Logan…

…and Blair Reeve, local thespian and academic.

The judging panel included choreographer Eman Lam, novelist and academic Xu Xi

…and bilingual, award-winning comedian Andrew Chu.

The show consisted of two rounds with each competitor allowed 8 minutes to perform their own piece.

Matthew and Blair made it through to the final.

A literary spelling bee face-off ensued as the finalists went head-to-head attempting to spell (often foreign and/or obscure) author’s names…

Blair, who had spent the week penning impressively complex and verbose self-referential-meta-performance-prose, won by one point…

Round 2 of Literary Death Match kicks off at the Fringe tonight (Saturday) with a fresh set of contenders and judges. Click for the Facebook event. You can view videos of past Death Match smackdowns on Vimeo.

CxsN6rM.png (135×160)The show heads to Shanghai and Beijing next week, but Story Worthy Week continues in HK:

The very fact our city was included on the Death Match world tour affirms the progress HK’s bourgoning performing arts scene has made in just the past year. Regular live storytelling events only started appearing last summer with Tom Tiding and David Young’s ‘Story Night’.

A natural extension of the TakeOut Comedy community, storytelling has been huge for years in the US where ‘Risk’ and ‘The Moth’ in New York helped popularise the format.

‘Story Night’ was followed closely by Ysabelle Cheung’s ‘Liars’ League’ in which writer’s stories are performed by professional actors. The trend has now culminated in the Story Worthy Week Festival, which continues throughout the weekend and next week. Click here for a summary.

 



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