Assignment #2: Formatting Presentation

Our presentation will start off with a brief introduction to the birth of Bunraku theatre and the Edo period in Japan, during which Bunraku was created. We intend to format this as a collective and engaging discussion. Jamie, Rose and myself will take turns discussing main points and ask the audience (Will) questions as we go along. We will use visual elements such as short clips of videos as an example of what a traditional Bunraku performance looks like and how a puppet functions. After that we will move into a discussion about Chikamatsu and present our main argument and counterarguments about his work and how it related to the culture of seventeenth and eighteenth century Japan. Some things we thought would be useful during this part of the presentation are maps of Japan (from that era), crucial aspects of our argument and relationships outlined on an easel pad, and anything else that comes to us as we go along in our research and develop our ideas. To engage the audience we plan to include him (Will) in our conversation, asking questions about the argument to advance our main points and to allow for new ideas to develop from this conversation. We decided on this format for our presentation after a detailed discussion about the elements of an effective presentation, making sure we touched on how to engage the audience and taking examples from presentations we’ve seen in the past and elements of presentation’s from this class and other classes. We took notes on this, made bullet points, pooled our resources, weeded out a few ideas as ineffective (such as verbatim power points, physical puppetry, and dividing the presentation into timed segments) and decided that discussing topics as a group would be the best way to present.