Saturday, November 27, 2010

France

The Arcade Fire tour moved into France this past week, with dates in Marseille and Lyon.

We started out the week with only a handful of volunteers in Marseille; not sure entirely why, but I started to really work our social networks, and also asked the volunteers that had already signed up to help me in recruiting more people to join us. By show date, we had a full crew - I’m always so grateful for all of the work our volunteers do, esp when they rally together at the last minute for us, such as in this case!

Comedy team at work again!

We were joined as always by a diverse crew, including a teacher, several students, two mobile app developers and a public health worker. The team did great, giving us our best night on the tour thus far! All night they talked to fans, really focusing on getting them excited and inspired by what Kanpe and PIH are doing. As with most of our trainings, Marika came out and joined us to talk about the band’s involvement and support for these campaigns - her help was especially appreciated at these two shows given her fluency (and my lack of) in French! Our volunteers have all for the most part been bi-lingual, so no big issues there, but it’s always great to have someone else on hand who can help with translations. Team Marseille did really great - they signed up almost 20% of the audience in attendance than night (a pretty impressive feat for ten people to accomplish!), which in turn means that they talked to and inspired hundreds of people!

After a day off (and a band/crew ‘Thanksgiving Dinner’ in France) we moved onto Lyon. The venue was really cool - I was told it was an old meatpacking warehouse. Team Lyon came in ready to work; I found them all gathered together ready to go at the meeting time, and I assumed most of them already knew each other since they were chatting away. As it would turn out, they just found each other, and were excited, and started to talking to one another outside in the cold - I always love to see teams form a bond like that at the get go, they were such a cute group!

Mighty team Lyon!

They worked like crazy too - it seems each show we do, the more people we end up talking to! They all stayed for a long time after the show ended as well, talking to fans for nearly an hour - it was a pretty crazy end of the night in Lyon!

The tour moves into Germany next, hoping it’s not too cold!

No comments: