Japan -Kijimuna Festa

The final festival before we take a break for summer in our touring is the Kijimuna Festa on the island of Okinawa. We play Past Half Remembered from the 23rd to the 25th of July in the The Chamber of Commerce (!) in Okinawa City. Since the festival only have two venues they have converted a lot of other buildings into theatre spaces the time of the festival.The Chamber of Commerce is a made into a nice venue and I think its a good example for other cities to convert their Chamber of Commerce into a theatre for a while.

Here is Iva talking thru the final details with help of our very kind translator Misa.

Most of us flew in via Helsinki and Osaka and spend about 21 hours of travel to get here. We got some help to translate the menu before our first meal in Japan.


The festival host a lot of companies both from Europe and Asia and there has been a lot of good exchange both artistic and for network building. The head of the festival invited us all to a barbecue on the beach on the second day here and we learned to read some new and unusual signs.



We play our last performance in Okinawa tomorrow afternoon and most of us are heading back to Europe already on Monday. Our next performance is Everything Falls Apart in Korjaamo, Helsinki on the 29th and 30th of August. I will therefore wish all our readers a nice summer with a picture of the setting sun in the Pacific. And also a thanks to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian Embassy in Tokyo for their kind support to bring us to Japan.



Written by Kjell Moberg- Associate Director of NIE

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.

Table Tennis and Football in Germany

We played four shows in Recklinghausen as part of the Ruhrfestspiele Festival. And we played in a tent… it was a very nice tent but was a bit hot sometimes. I had to dry clean my costume twice when Cat (our producer) told me that I was smelly. We had four really good shows with a bit of a small audience on the Thursday (but still a great show).

We were worried about the audience for the show on the Friday as we were competing with the opening of the World Cup in South Africa which was a big event in Recklinghausen but in fact it was our best show and biggest house.

On Thursday we bought Table Tennis bats for Euro 1.50 and played on the table in the school-yard where the tent was pitched. We found this 4 way table and sort of worked out how to play on it. It’s a bit like the four-square game that we often play in rehearsals. When we left I donated the bats to the tech crew who were brilliant all week (at teching not at table tennis – they might be good at that too but they would not play us – scared of my killer serve I think)



On Friday night we packed up My Life With the Dogs and headed off to watch France – Uraguai in a bar – as you know it was 0-0 and a bit boring.

Back home now but off to the Czech Republic next week for the festival in Hradec and a big workshop.

Posted by Alex Byrne - Artistic Director