Big Fish Theatre Company uses theatre to generate effective learning and change, says Kate Holdom.
Six months ago the company heard of a new round of grants from the Youth Justice Board (YJB), the purpose of which was to encourage collaborations between Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) and small voluntary organisations. I then worked closely with members of the Southwark YOT team to design a theatre-based intervention programme that would affirm and enhance its existing work and would eventually become part of its statutory supervision. Our application to the YJB was successful and we began work in January of this year.
The majority of our work is based on a model of theatre practice called ?forum theatre? created by the Brazilian director Augusto Boal. This model has been used all over the world and forms the basis of most issue-based community theatre and theatre work within the prison and probation service in this country today. Essentially, forum is a theatrical game in which problems are the focus; it provides a simple but effective structure for a group of people to rehearse change in order to make change in their real lives.
We researched and produced a series of interactive theatre workshops using trigger pieces that address a range of issues relating to our client group?s lives and offending behaviour. The three pieces focus on street robbery, car crime and assault and all have elements of forum theatre in them. These pieces now form the basis of extended group work over a five-week period. Each week we have a team of four actors, a facilitator and at least one YOT worker working with a group of young people aged between 14 and 17, all of whom are on various YOT orders including Action Plan Orders or Supervision Orders. As the Artistic Director and Project Manager, I knew that the greatest challenge was to produce pieces of drama that were exciting, challenging and, most importantly, real to the client group. Without these qualities it would prove very difficult to engage the young people in the workshops, and if the group was not engaged from the outset then resistance could grow and eventually present itself in the form of sabotage or complete withdrawal. So the use of set, props, costume and sound transformed the normal group space into a theatrical space. This transformation immediately set up a new dynamic and stimulated intrigue and questions from the group members which in turn began to break down some of the usual barriers in group work of this kind.
We have just completed the first five-week programme and the feedback has been excellent. It seems from both the regular attendance, level of participation and evaluation that we successfully presented the group with dramas that they identified with, that moved them, amused them and engaged them. Scenes of dilemma, choice, decision and conflict were acted and re-enacted forming a debate in action as well as words. Having a team of skilled actors present at every session has been a wonderful resource to this project; they have been on hand to skillfully enact the groups? suggestions, develop their stories and respond to their direction. Group members clearly found it exciting to see their own ideas and stories spontaneously performed by the actors to them. I also witnessed a strong desire in many of the group members to emulate the skills they saw which prompted them to have a go themselves.
At the end of our first programme I am satisfied that we have achieved most of our aims and met some new ones but I am also aware that no two groups can ever be the same and that the ride might not be as easy next time!
Kate Holdom is Artistic Director of Big Fish Theatre Company. t: 0208 692 8172 e: kate@bigfishtheatre.co.uk