The Christmas Fair was a great success on Sunday! Thank you to all of you who get involved and helped us raise lots of treasure!

The Hackney Pirates invite you to celebrate Christmas pirate style! We are taking over The Golden Hinde, a tudor galleon moored on the South Bank. The wonderful City Shanty Band will be headlining the night, and there will be live music, DJs, games & shenanigans spread over three decks. There is only limited space on board, so hurry to buy one of the 100 tickets here, and we’ll looking forward to rocking the boat with you!

This is a momentous time. No longer are we part-time Pirates. No longer do we shuffle back to normal life once a session is over. No longer are we forced to strip ourselves of feathers and our sense of adventure and carry on a mundane existence for the rest of the week. We have officially set sail! The Hackney Pirates full-time after-school program was launched Monday the 3rd October in our brand new location on Downham Road and we are excited.

We have lots of new shipmates, many more volunteers, and an enormous space to transform into our ship of learning. Ben and Camillia are volunteering for us full time to help build the Ideas Room, the Theatre Bazaar, and the Main Deck, as well as a 3D installation of the prow of our ship. The Young Pirates now come every day after school for help with their homework and to work on creative projects, and we are well underway with writing our book, to be published by the end of term, full of creative writing around the theme of Journeys. One thing we do know is that this is the start of a life-changing one.

So, the last day of the workshops had arrived! All the pirates had a lot to do to get the film finished, and every scene was shot, despite interruptions from helicopters, sirens, and other people using enjoying the Roof Park. The pirates also decorated a banner to be taken to our next home, wherever that might be… Joe completed some interviews with the young pirates and Holly led some questionnaires. Once that was all finished, it was time to say thank you to all the volunteers, especially Sam, Joe and Holly, and for the young pirates to receive their Sheep’s Journey DVDs and packs of postcards. Goodbye pirates! See you in September!

The long awaited day of the Pirate Party arrived, and was greeted by…. buckets and buckets of rain! We started the session with a warm up from the fantastic Tiphaine to help the pirates move their bodies and project their voices (against the raging gale)! We bravely managed to host the whole session under cover on the roof, in which we rehearsed, and rehearsed, and rehearsed! Great dedication was shown by all sea mates, resulting in a thrilling preview in the evening’s Pirate Party (relocated downstairs out of the rain). We were also lucky enough to see the world premiere of The Silver World animation (thank you Saskia!). It is amazing, and if you missed it last night you can see it here. Last day tomorrow. Boo Hoo.

The first ever read through of the much anticipated “A Pirate’s Tale” written by The Hackney Pirates was heard today at 1:30pm on the Dalston Roof Park. Not to spoil the surprise, but it includes card games, hypnotised crocodiles and a magic shrink gun! Each act rehearsed their parts, built their set, and made their props ready for the live dress performance tomorrow evening. Don’t forget to learn those lines tonight pirates!

Today, we started the session thinking up the crucial details of the characters we’d created for ourselves in our improvised play; for instance, Captain Funny does not like carrots. With the main story outlined already, we also needed to pull all of our hard work into a script. Each pirate took a scene each to write, meaning that The Hackney Pirates may have created the only script equally co-written by 14 writers ever! A new world record perhaps? Tomorrow we will build the sets and props…

East London Lines, a local news website, found out about how The Hackney Pirates responded to the riots and wrote a story about us! You can read the article here.

Film week, our final week of the summer workshops, has started! Today the Pirates were told their mission, and were handed a mysterious bag, full of props ranging from a toy pig to an alarm clock. Using only their bare wit and imagination, they had to create the story for a pirate play. A massive thanks to Kristina and Sofia for running a fantastic warm up, and to Tiphaine, the drama expert who ran most of today’s session and really managed to get our creative juices flowing! The end results, performed to the group, were… a little rough round the edges… but full of amazing creative ideas, sword fighting and treasure hunting! Tomorrow we will turn the ideas into the script for our plays.