Hradec Workshop 2010

The Hradec workshop is over now and everyone has made their way back home. We had more people there than ever before and did 5 days of really great work. There were some new faces as well as the usual suspects.

Most people stayed in the fabulous Hotel Garni which I am told

has the worlds smallest towels, "towels" I hear you cry - "what western decadence."

We had good weather but not too hot as in some previous years and we ate lunch outside everyday.

We also played our shows B61 and Everything Falls Apart in the festival and these went very very well.

Some of us spent some time watching the football in the sports bar as well.... I got the England - Germany score wrong in my predictions, which was embarrassing but not fatal. I should have listened to the magic octopus...

All I can say here is bad luck Germany, who, like England, just were not quite good enough to go all the way.

The Past Half Remembered team are off to Japan soon, so good luck to them and maybe one of them will stick up some pictures of the trip???

This post was written by Alex Byrne - Artistic Director of NIE.

The season is over

Our development week in Hradec has come to and end. There is a fantastic story of Nils wandering around Hotel Garni(sh) in his '70s underwear, but i'd be doing his story injustice by just writing it down. For full effect, it needs his facial expression and sense of timing. So you'll have to ask him to tell you the story himself.

Here are some of the things we did:

There was some swimming in the lake, followed by an enormous downpour.



There was playing football in the park...




There were some games...



Some puppetry...



Some rehearsing...





And some drinking...



And some eating...



And some more rehearsing...



And some chocolate fondue...



And more rehearsing...



And a performance.


And now we're all home or on our way back home from Hradec for a well-deserved 5 week holiday.

Development week in Hradec

It's very hot in Hradec. It usually is when we're here.
So my brain is slowly reaching meltdown.
Which means the reports on Hradec will be mainly visual.







This little girl was looking through the window all of Monday afternoon. She's the daughter of the people who run the bar next to the space. Other than that, we don't know anything about her.




On Tuesday afternoon the little girl made it into the space. And watched.

Off to Hradec Kralove

Our show in Linz went very well, there were lots of people there and they all looked like they enjoyed it, so we packed up last night and drove to Prague.
This wasn't part of our original plan (we were supposed to drive straight from Linz to Hradec today), but it is so hot we decided it would be better to drive the bulk of the way in the evening. So apologies to the people we didn't say goodbye to.

Right now we are repacking vans in Prague and will be off soon to meet up with a lot of NIE and non-NIE people to do Instant Epic in Hradec Kralove.
Everyone is travelling: David, Tom, Bara, Nikita, Aude, Katchenka, Anna S, Lenka, Nils Petter, David C, Jerry, Jill, Elisabet, Unai, Alex, Bob, Kjell, Iva, little Anna, Sasha, Cat and I.
Later this week we will be joined for a few days by Kate and Honza (who will start touring with us as a technician this autumn).

On Thursday morning we will play the Song, on Friday and Saturday evening we will play Instant Epic. In the meanwhile we will just play.