The origins of «Nights at the allotment»
When we came up with the idea of «Nights at the allotment», we originally thought of something home-grown to pass the hot summer evenings. It turns out we have a lot of artists at the allotment: Those who don´t play the saxophone, play the guitar, or do stand-up comedy, or is an actor, or writes stories, or does crazy performances. Simply with our own folk we had enough entertainment for the whole summer. We had the artistic part, but we needed everything else. And it turned out that at the allotment we also had carpenters, electricians, website designers, cooks, waiters, people who knew about sound and lighting. So, we got to work. We built a stage in an area where people dumped building waste, and our summer entertainment became a festival, poster and all, with social media, with a grill for sandwiches and bathtubs to cool drinks in (we think we are pioneers in this). This can only happen in a collective as diverse as ours.
Building the stage on its current location took a lot of assemblies. The final decision was based on the fact that we already knew that the «Nights at the allotment» would be open to anyone from the neighbourhood. What we didn´t know yet was that years later we would have an audience of 500 people every Friday.
The photo shows the charming stage, barely 2 square metres, which we built for the inauguration on 20th May 2016.