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The 2005 World Expo in the Japanese prefecture of Aichi is slowly drawing to a close. As part of the huge international show, visitors have been able to enjoy the Czech contribution entitled "The Garden of Fantasy and Music".

The evening calm of Prague's Vltava River has been disrupted this week by a lively theatre production on board a 276-foot tugboat. While cruising on the river in the very heart of Prague, audiences have been enthralled by a theatre adaptation of Russian author Alexandr Glin's maritime fairytale Nachove plachty or Purple Sails as it's known in English. Purple Sails is the brainchild of Petr and Matej Forman - the twin sons of renowned film director Milos Forman. It was first presented in Prague in 2000 as a special event to mark the Czech capital's

The Disman Ensemble is a great Czech cultural institution. Founded by the teacher and broadcaster Miloslav Disman in 1935, it is celebrating its 70th birthday this year. The ensemble is attached to Czech Radio and all its members are children and teenagers. Every year it puts on plays, concerts and other performances, many of them for broadcast on Czech Radio. This summer six members of the ensemble were involved in a rather unusual exchange. They spent a week in the Japanese city of Kyoto - one of Prague's twin cities - on the invitation of a

In the arts this week, we report on a public drive to raise funds for the restoration of the statues of the National Theatre. We also take a look at The Pope Smoked Dope, a retrospective of sixties counter-culture, which is being held in Prague.

Hamlet - an original Czech musical composed and written by Czech hit maker Janek Ledecky. It's based on Shakespeare's classic and was a great success with Czech audiences when it was premiered six years ago - instead of the 300 performances that were originally planned, its run extended to no less than 600. The musical was also a hit in the Slovak capital Bratislava and has been now also adapted into an English version. There are plans to bring it to the United States next year.

Back in 1999, one of the country's most renowned contemporary music composers and conductors, Petr Kotik, founded the Ostrava Center for New Music. It worked closely with the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra to present works by leading musicians such as John Cage, Earle Brown, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, to an audience that had yet to warm up to 'new music'. On Monday, 39 music students from 20 countries will flock to the North Moravian city of Ostrava for the Ostrava Days 2005.

In the summer there really is no shortage of music festivals to visit throughout the Czech Republic but none is, arguably, as original and diverse as Pacovsky Polednik, held in August. Now in its 6th year, the festival takes its name from the town where it's held - Pacov - in the Czech-Moravian highlands, located on the 15th meridian - patnacty polednik - in Czech.

The International Music Academy in Pilsen (about 100 kilometers south west of Prague) is a month summer course teaching young people the violin. Even though it is the first time that the academy is taking place in Pilsen, the course builds on the much older tradition of the Summer Violin School in Meadowmount, New York.

While for most of the year Prague concert halls offer dozens of concerts every week, in the summer months, when people leave for their holidays most concerts are aimed at foreign tourists - almost every day you can hear several rather ropy renderings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Mozart's Requiem in churches around the city.

If you want to visit a theatre in Prague, summer is not the best time. Even though there are dozens of theatres in the city performing all year round, a lot of them close for the summer months of July and August, others have only a few performances during the summer. Two theatres decided to take advantage of this gap and organized a small theatre festival called "Leto u more" - "Summer by the Sea".