Yesterday afternoon we played at the Centre professionnel de Renan (BE), a socio-therapeutic community where adults with disabilities can live and work.

Situated in a small valley of the Bernese Jura Mountains which was all the more beautiful as spring has just arrived up there with all its shades of new freshly sprouted green contrasting with the dark evergreen pines.

The auditorium turned out to be much larger, and modern, than expected with a very big stage that fortunately had all the necessary curtains to resize and create a more intimate setting. Chairs where perfectly lined up in front of it and I must admit that while we set up our gear I imagined a crowd sitting very politely as for a concert of classical music. It’s a fact that we had just been told that we were the first to play non-classical music in the room so who knew how we would be accepted by the audience.

But we had barely played the intro to our first song when already folks where getting up to dance!

Each concert is different, some seem to take forever to get the crowd moving, some kind of go back and forth like in a bar where the crowd hesitates between their own stories and ours, and some just seem to happen as everything clicks together and makes a memorable event. Yesterday was like that, a tremendous amount of fun which ended with folks from the audience onstage with us during the encores playing various percussion instruments and harmonicas and I believe pretty much everyone got all the breaks right!

We thank the Centre professionnel de Renan for inviting us to play for them and thank everyone who participated for being such a fantastic crowd!

Hopefully we will receive a picture or two to post! :P
Thanks Karin for the pictures, what would we do without you? :-)

Some great audience participation!

-Rattlebrained