Monthly Archives: July 2017

On Saturday 24 June I was drawing to accompany Grad Gori at this international festival hosted by Drak Puppet Theatre.  The performance was held in the big tent outside the building of the puppet theatre and museum, and their programme was similar to the performance at which I did drawings in Gyor in Hungary. This time I was drawing on the roof of the tent as the ‘wall’ behind the stage was covered with black fabric.This made it not so easy to connect the images and the musicians – and also I had to contend with the distortion of the sloping surface of the canvas. Most of the songs were quite short which meant that there was not enough time to develop an appropriate image for each item, although I was able to merge one drawing into another for some of the programme.With hindsight, perhaps for this location it would have been better just to develop more fully two or three drawings rather than try to ‘match’ the images to individual songs….Of course there was no time for me to take photos but as Dima was testing his new video camera these are a few screenshots of the performance.This was the first time that we have visited Divadlo Drak and before the performance we were given a most interesting tour of the theatre and puppet museum. I wished we had had the time to see a performance in the theatre building, but we did see the premiere of Matija Solce’s ‘Dog’s Life’ in the big tent (which was great!) and before we left the festival on Sunday morning we watched the open air ‘Cirkus Nostalgie‘ – this was a delightful performance, featuring acrobatics and clowning, with musical accompaniment by the band Tygroo on a ‘stage’ formed by curtains strung between two old-fashioned caravans. We ate pancakes in the sunshine and everyone was laughing and happy – a perfect end to our visit to Hradec Kralove!