Iva, Guri, Kai Kenneth and Marie in first days of rehearsals.
The lunchroom in Dikemark. The space we are working in is the community center inside the grounds of what was former Norway biggest mental hospital. Nowadays its only the most dangerous patients left, and of course us…..
Elke and Kieran decided to go to get a table tennis table and stopped by in our house. My two kids did not want them to leave. More on table tennis in the next post.
Alex met with Steffi today (our set designer and one of the performers in Hansel & Gretel performing this Christmas at The Junction) to talk in detail about ideas for the set design. We will transform the theatre into a forest so we are currently talking to local tree surgeons about using bits of cut-off branches in our set. Steffi has also been working on some beautiful puppets which we use in the show:
Here they are in our office at The Junction, Cambridge with a head still to be added to little Hansel!
Location:Norway
This is the hut on top of the hill behind Longyearbyen
This kern is at the top of the hill behind Ny Byen where we stayed. 
The Russians left in January of 1998, they left almost everything behind including lots of personal stuff - I think there was a tight limit on the amount of stuff that they could take with them, they had only a weeks notice of the decision to move them out. They left all of the mining gear and the buildings have been empty since then. Our guide Victor told us that many buildings were now locked up because too many people had taken souvenirs away with them.
We got there in a small Arctic Circle boat that Victor drove, that meant back into full exposure suits and a very cold and windy hour out on the Fjord.
The mine is a beautiful location with a view of a huge glacier just across the water but the mine itself must have been big, ugly, noisy complex when it was working, now it looks a bit forlorn.
You can see here it was quite a big complex - with its own farm for pigs and chickens and cows, a school and a swimming pool, there are still a few people staying there to look after visitors and they run a small bar....
The walk into town from the old dock took about 5 minutes.
Victor told us that this was a dangerous place because bears could sometimes be in between the buildings or around the mine and you could not see them coming in the same way that you can in open country. He carried his gun all the time. We did not see a bear, just lots of seagulls who seemed to have taken over some of the buildings.
The mine was once the pride of the Soviet system and a very popular place to work because the pay was good and the people were well looked after.
In the main square there was a children's area next to the school and an area of grass that had been shipped in from Siberia and planted here - this grass does not normally grow here (at least thats what Victor told us)
The square had a number of monuments with a kind of arctic, communist feel.
And was overlooked at the top by this bust of Lenin - looking out to the east over his Polar domain.
The sports hall was huge and impressive given the size of the community and also housed a big cultural / performance space as well.
There was also an impressive swimming pool.
Some of the buildings still had lost of stuff left inside, these are pictures of the some of the mine staff, there we also shift books and all sorts of papers in this machine room.
My favourite were the safety posters in the access walkway, some had been stolen but there were still lots left - maybe some one out there can translate this one for me?
It is a working mine town and everyone who works there is employed by the mine company -even the girls working in the hotel bar. The people working here get all the meals and other needsprovided by the company, so it is a small society without any cash because there is nothing to buy.
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