Arirang Festival, North Korea - The Human Jumbotron

Reading about the book Spectacle reminded me of an article I read ages ago about the Arirang Festival in North Korea. It's basically a huge propaganda exercise to try and convince themselves (and in recent years the rest of the world) that they're a force to be reckoned with.

Their method of persuasion? Gymnastics of course!

It's held in a huge stadium (150,000 capacity) every year on April 15th the birthday of their late God/leader Kim Il-Sung and features "mass gymnastics" which involves tens of thousands of kids/robots doing ridiculous elaborate gymnastic routines to the soundtrack of twee-tastic pop music and what can only be described as a "Human Jumbotron" a giant mosaic made up of 15,000 school kids holding up cards to form mosaics which change at break-neck speed, it really is incredibly impressive.

You can read more about it here, the original article I read about it.

a few sample images:




There's also a documentary which I just found about called "A State Of Mind" made by BBC in 2004 which follows two girls as they prepare to take part in the festival, it looks pretty good:

Trailer: