Saturday, January 6, 2007

JD visiting Robert Barth in Germany #2







 We did a tree critique over four hours for the local club together.

I have developed something which I call 'Extended Tree Critique':

Instead of standard demonstrations or workshops I have developed another concept for a major lecture: People bring one or several trees to the public critique. The trees should be in all stages of development: outright raw material, intermediate and 'finished' bonsai. They should be in all variations of quality: very poor, normal, very good.

Normally I get from 10 to 30 trees for such a lecture. I then thoroughly analyze every single tree and discuss it with the audience. Make sure that everybody understands that a tree critique is about hearing the truth about a tree. Such a session can last from two hours to four hours.

The advantages over a regular demo: very educational, very entertaining, no cost to the club for demo trees, no problems of providing the right kind of demo material, interesting for all levels of experience, from outright novices to masters.

The advantages over a regular workshop: more educational than a normal workshop, more participants possible, in fact, the number is almost unlimited, participants with all levels of experience find it interesting.

I think this concept can dramatically change the mainstream demonstrations. I have the strong feeling that something must be done here. The public obviously does not accept the old-fashioned way as it used to anymore.

One idea is to have several masters doing a critique on the same trees on stage. Like one hour master #1, one hour master #2 etc.. This could be quite interesting. People in all stages of expertise should want to see this. We could get back the major part of the audience which we are loosing with standard demonstrations.


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