Geese Annual Review 2010/11

Theatre and Drama within the Criminal Justice System:Performances n Workshops n Residencies n Long-term programmes n Staff training n Consultancy

look beyondannual review 2010/11

GEESE THEATRE COMPANY

3 Welcome

4-5 Adults in prison

6 Adults in mental health settings

7 Adults in the community

8-9 Young people

10-11 Conferences and training

12-13 Research and evaluation

14 Financial summary

15 Members of the executive committee and company

Contents

2

“Geese Theatre Company aims to produce stimulatingand innovative, issue-based theatre and drama workwith the intention of facilitating choice, responsibility

and change amongst individuals.”

Quote from our Mission Statement

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ANNUAL REVIEW 2010/11 3

From the Chair

The Company’s integrity,creativity and commitmentto theoretical rigour isinspirational. The Board ofTrustees is proud to beassociated with a staff teamwho are passionate,knowledgeable, responsiveand have consistently highexpectations of themselves,of each other and of theirclient groups.

Geese is dedicated todeveloping and improvingits practice throughreflection, listening toparticipants, examiningimpact and commissioningwider evaluation andresearch into the work.While I have been Chair ofthe Board, one of the mostexciting aspects of the rolehas been to hear fromacademics who haveengaged in some of thatimportant research.

Further details can be foundlater in this review.

As a Board, we arecommitted to spreading theword about Geese. If youwould like to learn moreabout how to support thisimportant work, pleasecontact the companydirectly or you can make a donation via the following websites:

www.thebiggive.org.uk

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com

Selwyn BlythChair

Welcome

The power of theatre anddrama to encourage peopleto ‘look beyond’ cannot beunderestimated - to lookbeyond the prison walls, tolook beyond the role ofoffender, to look beyond thelabel and to look beyond the‘here and now’ to the future.Geese’s theatre challenges,asks difficult questions,provokes discussion andinvites reflection. Feedbackfrom participants involvedin our projects tell us thatthe experience has beenmemorable, uplifting,effective and life-changing -that they are motivated tolook beyond their currentcircumstances withconfidence and self-belief.

2010/11 has been a testingyear with major changes toboth the arts fundinglandscape and to theCriminal Justice System.Indeed, the closure of HMPLancaster Castle, where wehad developed a long-standing collaborativeapproach to addressingoffender rehabilitation, has meant some trulyinnovative partnershipworking has had to come to an abrupt end.

Despite this instability, wehave still developed a wide-range of projects thatengage with some of themost marginalised andexcluded individuals. These projects and anumber of others from the year are highlighted in these pages.

None of this would bepossible without thegenerous funding we receivefrom a number of trusts andfoundations or without thehard work and dedication ofour small team of staff.Mostly, though, we aregrateful to the organisationsand agencies who are willingto support the use of the artswith those most excludedfrom society, who are willingto look beyond theimmediate and recognisethe potential long-termbenefits of an arts basedapproach and who see thework that we engage in as anecessity and not a luxury.

Andy WatsonArtistic Director

Geese Theatre Company is about to celebrate its25th Birthday and, in that time, it has become aninternational authority on drama and theatre-based practice with offenders.

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In 2010/11, Geese worked with 1122 prisoners

We delivered 18performances of interactiveplays and 47 workshopswith themes ranging fromdomestic violence,resettlement, engaging ineducation and violencereduction

GEESE THEATRE COMPANY4

“This kind of course is amazing. It is another way oflearning which is active and fun. The facilitators used

their skills and drama techniques to get me to open up in a

way I hadn’t done previously.”

Participant - HMP Huntercombe

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Adults in prison

5ANNUAL REVIEW 2010/11

At the heart of our work is the delivery of a range ofinteractive performances and theatre-based projectswith adult offenders in prison settings. These cover adiverse range of themes, including violence reductionand safer custody, substance misuse, parenting,barriers to education and oracy.

All of our projects aredesigned to complementprogrammes operatingwithin a prison regime or toaugment the work ofparticular prison teams,such as the Integrated DrugTreatment Service, PrisonersAddressing SubstanceRelated Offending, SaferCustody and HealthyRelationships.

HMP Huntercombe

Working in partnership with the Head of Reducing Re-offending, in 2011 we devised athree-day projectexploring offendingbehaviour for men at HMP Huntercombe. Eachproject had a differentfocus depending on thenature of the individualsin the group but oftenrevolved around either thelink between substancemisuse and offending orviolent offending. Themen who took part inthese projects wereexcited to be given theopportunity to reflect onsome of their behaviourand relished theopportunities to rehearsedifferent solutions in asafe and supportiveenvironment. For theGeese practitioners, it wasa pleasure to watch theproject develop and towork alongsideconsistently motivatedmen, who provided someemotional and often veryhumorous moments.

Jon Watson Senior Company Member

Journey Woman

Developed with funding fromArts Council England,Journey Woman is our fiveday prison residency forwomen. We begin each weekby showing the group apowerful full-maskperformance, which followsthe story of Ellie, a womanwho has broken out of acycle of hardship, offendingand prison. The womenmake compellingconnections between Ellie’sstory and their own, whichpromotes strong emotionalengagement in the process.Using the metaphor of ajourney, we then invite thewomen to contemplate‘where they are’, ‘where theywant to be’ and ‘whatobstacles they might have toovercome’. Over the courseof the week the womenexplore realistic plans fortheir future and, usingtheatre-based exercises,practise appropriate skills tohelp them move forwardwith confidence and acommitment to change.

Louise Heywood Deputy Artistic Director

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Working with adultoffenders in secure hospitalsettings has always been apart of our remit and thanksto generous funding from theLankellyChase Foundation,we have been able to developa series of long-term projectsin these settings.

Working with men andwomen with mental healthissues provides its ownchallenges but we areconvinced that providingcreative opportunitiesallows people a space toexplore their own identity,to consider the roles theyplay and the impact thattheir behaviour has onthemselves and on others.

Adults in mental health settings

“I learned more confidence, how to listen toothers more efficiently, how to ‘think on myfeet’ and how to deal with potentially difficultsocial situations. I feel I can approach peoplemuch better and feel with the help of thiscourse it has made our ward easier to live in.”

Participant - St Andrew’s Secure Hospital

In 2010/11, Geese workedwith 333 patients inmental health settings

Thrive

Thrive is a three-yearproject delivered inpartnership with St Andrew’s MediumSecure Hospital inBirmingham. Through theyear, the company hasdelivered awarenessraising and training eventsfor staff on the wards,followed by a 16 weekprogramme of arts-basedengagement activity ontwo wards, one mediumsecure and one low secure.

In the former, the projectfocussed primarily on anexploration of inter-personal skills and thenotion of the ward as‘community’, whilst in thelatter the focus was moreon ‘moving on’ and theprocess of leaving thehospital and re-integratinginto the community.

One of the excitingaspects of this partnershipwith LankellyChase and St Andrew’s is that it isenabling us to researchand evaluate our approachand to make comparisonswith the methodology wemight employ whenworking with offenders in prisons.

Jon WatsonSenior Company Member

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Since 1988 we have worked in close partnership with anumber of Probation Trusts to design and co-deliver a rangeof offending behaviour programmes. In 2010/11, Geese staffco-delivered sessions on the probation accreditedprogrammes for domestic violence perpetrators and for menconvicted of sexual offences.


In 2010/11, Geeseworked with 1254offenders on probation

Much of our work involves usdelivering performances (seecase study below) designed toinvite the men to considerlevels of responsibility fortheir offending. We alsodeliver active, experientialworkshops that provideoffenders with theopportunity to identify risksituations, consider theirthoughts and feelings, and torehearse ‘new me’ ways ofdealing with those situations.

Adults in thecommunity

“We have worked together with the Geese TheatreCompany for many years. They are able to engage withoffenders in a creative and imaginative way, using dramato recreate experiences and teach new ways of behaving.In this way, they encourage responsibility and enableoffenders to experience and understand theconsequences of their actions, and so add value to theprogrammes we run.”

Mark FarmerHead of the Regional Sex Offender Unit, Staffordshire and West Midlands Probabtion Trust

Stay with domesticviolence groups

In 2010/11, Geese delivered15 performances of Stay anda further 13 days ofgroupwork with domesticviolence perpetrators inprobation settings.

Stay is a performance aboutdomestic abuse, whichdepicts the collapse of onecouple’s relationship in theface of the man’s controllingbehaviour, emotional abuseand physical violence.

It also explores the impactof his behaviour on hispartner and son. During theinteractive piece, audience

members engage with themale character, challenginghis distorted beliefs andjustifications.

This piece has an immediateand visceral impact on themen and acts as a powerfulstimulus to self-recognition.

Louise Heywood Deputy Artistic Director

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Young people

Each year, we deliver various projects, working closely with young people in custodial settings and in the community. In 2008, Geese were fortunate tobe chosen as one of the pilot schemes in Arts Council England's YoungPeople's Participatory Theatre Project. This provided us with a year-longopportunity to investigate best practice when engaging young offenders in a creative theatre process.

Informed by that experience, our approach for 2010/11 involved weaving strands of differentstyles of creativity into a wider exploration of behaviour and reflection for personaldevelopment. As a consequence, much of our successful work with young people in bothcommunity and custodial settings has been when working in close partnership either withother agencies or with other artists.

Inside Theatre

2010/11 was the first year ofthree years funding from BBCChildren in Need allowing usto develop a series of week-long residencies with youngpeople in custodial settings.Inside Theatre incorporatesdifferent art forms includingtheatre, mask, dance, filmand creative writing and asksthe participants to look,creatively, at issues ofresettlement, behaviourmanagement and theconsequences of behaviour.With each residency, weincrease our knowledge abouthow to engage with youngpeople and how to work withother artists to establish asafe and creative space.

Adrian DakersCompany Member

XCL

The XCL project took placeover 2 years in partnershipwith Shropshire, Telfordand Wrekin YouthOffending Service,working alongside variousyoung people connectedto the Youth OffendingTeam, Youth Inclusion andSupport Programme andConnexions. Part-fundedby ‘Find Your Talent’, eachintervention ranged fromthree to five days and, inaddition to providing anopportunity to experimentwith a variety of art forms,it gave the young people asafe space to exploredifferent perspectives,reflect on behaviours andpractise alternatives. Theproject culminated in agroup of young peoplewriting, performing andproducing The RippleEffect; a DVD focussing onvictim empathy, whichwas premiered to aninvited audience at theOdeon Cinema in Telford.

Emma Smallman Company Member

“Geese provide an entirelydifferent way for people toexamine thoughts andfeelings within the safety ofthe third person. Theirfacilitation skills areexceptional and althoughthere is performance withintheir work it feels so naturalthat everyone can feel a partof the process. When this isin full flow it allows for alevel of honesty and self-reflection that might neverbe reached throughconventional interventions.”

PC Mick ChaddertonWest Mercia Constabulary

“It was clear that there wasa lot of hard work andcommitment that had goneinto the film, by the youngpeople, the Geese Theatreworkers and the staff atClayfields House - it wasgreat to see suchcollaboration.”

Melinda ConnellyRegional Manager -Midlands, BBC Children in Need

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“Excellent project, which the young peoplereally enjoyed. The Geese staff were excellentwith the young people, which resulted in asuperb performance by the group.”

Staff Member, Hillside Secure Unit

Geese worked with 244 young peoplein 2010/11, delivering 18 five-dayresidencies and 11 performances

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Geese have deliveredtraining to 1304professionals acrossa variety of agenciesin 2010/11

We deliver dynamic,interactive theatreperformances designed toprovoke audience discussionfor organisations in thewider social welfare arena.

These performances aredevised in close consultationwith the commissioningagency and are created toclosely mirror theexperiences that audiencemembers may face in theirdaily roles. Performancescan bring to life theoreticalconcepts, academic researchor practice-based issues andcan be a much moreengaging than a traditionalKeynote or Powerpointpresentation.

Conference performances

Conferencesand training

Organisations that commissioned us tocreate and deliver staff training events orperformances in 2010/11 include:

n Bristol Methodist Churchn Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Sports

Partnershipn Cambridgeshire County Counciln Canoness of St Augustinen Ceredigion Local Education Authorityn Dartford Borough Counciln Diocese of Liverpooln Education Welfare Servicen Family Law Bar Associationn Fife Criminal Justice Servicen Greenwich Counciln In-Trac Training and Consultancy Ltd

n Living Sportn Merthyr Tydfil Youth Offending Teamn Ministry of Justicen North Lanarkshire Counciln Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trustn One Leisure Ramseyn Portsmouth Diocesan Trustn Safer Merthyr Tydfiln Solihull Local Safeguarding

Children Boardn South Lanarkshire Counciln St Andrew’s Healthcaren Stockport Metropolitan Borough Counciln Surrey Children's Servicesn Torfaen County Borough Counciln Wakefield MDC

Training courses

Our training courses drawupon 24 years of experiencedelivering projects in theCriminal Justice System. All courses are deliveredusing theatre, drama andexperiential activity andcover a number of themesincluding working withresistance, introduction to groupwork, effective co-working and role-playfacilitation.

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n Safeguarding in faithcommunities

n Safeguarding in sports

n Multi-agency responses todomestic violence

n Dealing with resistantfamilies

n Family focussedintervention withoffenders

n The impact of earlytrauma on childdevelopment

n The importance ofeffective supervision

n We also created four training DVD’s.

“I feel that it is the best training coursethat I have accessed for a long time.

Excellent level of skill... Brilliant.”

Participant, The Other Side of the Wall training course

During 2010/11, 3118 people watcheda conference performance by Geese

“Stunning. I was totallyengaged and it wasemotionally verypowerful. This had themost impact of anyand many conference I

have attended.”

Delegate, Safeguarding inSports Conference

In 2010/11, Geese delivered 40 conferenceperformances with themes including:

Originally conceived in 2010in partnership with SportEngland, NSPCC ChildProtection in Sport Unit andProfessor CeliaBrackenridge, Crossing theLine is an interactiveconference performancedesigned for anyorganisation interested inexploring safeguardingissues in a sporting context.Originally performed tochief executives of sportsnational governing bodies, ithas since been adapted to

explore safeguarding issuesin a number of differentsports (football, swimming,judo) as well as for leisurecentres and County SportsPartnerships. Audiences areinvited to consider a rangeof issues including the wayin which perpetrators ofabuse use sport to groompotential victims, the role ofthe welfare officer, whistle-blowing, and the impact ofabuse on the individual, theclub and the sport.

Crossing the line

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Geese provided input in to 161Community Groupwork Programmesessions across a number ofProbation Trusts including London,Leicestershire and Rutland andStaffordshire and West Midlands


"I was totally knocked out by the scenes unravelling before me, so

powerful in fact that by the time I got home I was in tears...

Thank you for such a thought provoking performance and long may

you continue to provide such high quality service."

Group member on watching Stay as part of

the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme

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Research and evaluation

As one of the leading organisations promoting theuse of the arts in the Criminal Justice System, wetake our commitment to research and evaluatingthe efficacy of our work seriously.

In 2010/11 we were involvedin three significant pieces of research:

n An evaluation of ourresettlement project, Re-connect, waspublished in theInternational Journal ofOffender Therapy andComparative Criminology.This research was carriedout by the University ofBirmingham andcontinues our wellestablished partnershipwith its Centre forForensic andCriminologicalPsychology. The researchconcludes: “This studyprovides support not onlyfor the utility of the Re-connect programme in preparing participants for release, but alsoprovides support for thecontinued use of theatreand drama in thecriminal justice system.”

n Professor StephenBottoms from theUniversity of Leedspublished an article inthe journal Research inDrama in Educationentitled Silent Partners -Actor and Audience inGeese Theatre’s JourneyWoman. We hope thatthis article will be thefirst published essay inan ongoing relationshipwith the University of Leeds.

n Dr Gemma Hurst, fromthe University ofLiverpool, wrote herclinical thesis exploringthe change processesthat occur when maleperpetrators of domesticabuse watch Geese’sperformance Stay. Her thesis provides aclear rationale for thecontinued use of theatrein offender rehabilitation.


But Does It Work...?

In October 2010, we held apublic event entitled ButDoes It Work..?, attendedby over 80 people from across-section of the artsand criminal justiceworlds. We presentedhighlights from two of ourperformances, JourneyWoman and Stay, andheard from the twoacademics involved inresearching those pieces -Professor Bottoms and Dr Hurst. This was aunique event in that itoffered a demonstration of practice alongsidekeynote addresses, whichplaced the practicesquarely in a theoreticalframework. It also offeredthe audience anopportunity to debate withboth the practitioners andthe academics about thenature of the work, thewider contexts and the research.

Andy WatsonArtistic Director

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Financial summary

Unrestricted Restricted Total funds Total fundsfunds funds 2011 2010£ £ £ £

INCOMING RESOURCESIncoming resources from generated funds:Voluntary income 37,276 - 37,276 30,996 Activities for generating funds - 70,616 70,616 56,485 Investment income 70 - 70 44 Incoming resources from charitable activities 256,874 - 256,874 315,343 TOTAL INCOMING RESOURCES 294,220 70,616 364,836 402,868

Organisations who have supported us with awards and grants in 2010/11 are:

Surplus from Safeguarding in Sport Conference

Unrestricted 29,886

37,276TOTAL

The LankellyChase Foundation RestrictedThrive at St Andrew’s Medium Secure Hospital

11,250

The Michael Varah Memorial Fund Restricted Re-connect x 2 at HMP Highdown 3,140

BBC Children in Need Restricted Inside Theatre 10,906

Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin YOS Restricted XCL 45,320

70,616

Charitable activities

Our charitable activities includeperformances and group work withoffenders, young people at risk andprofessionals working within thecriminal justice system. This work is funded by the comissioningorganisation.

During the year 307 copies of theGeese Theatre Handbook were sold,bringing in an income of £1,580.

Other help and support

We have continued to receive helpfrom West Midlands PoliceAuthority in the form of permissionto park our three company vehiclesin their secure parking areaadjacent to our premises. We wouldlike to express our sincere thanks tothem for this concession.

Our thanks also go to PinsentMasons for their kind support inhosting the ‘But Does it Work…?’event in October 2010.

TOTAL

Arts Council England Unrestricted Regularly Funded Organisation 29,886

Fundraising by Trustees Unrestricted 1,085

Unrestricted Restricted Total funds Total fundsfunds funds 2011 2010£ £ £ £

RESOURCES EXPENDEDCosts of generating fundsFundraising: Cost of goods sold and other costs 2,798 - 2,798 3,431 Charitable activities 286,896 70,616 357,512 364,709 Governance costs 3,600 - 3,600 3,921TOTAL RESOURCES EXPENDED 293,294 70,616 363,910 372,061

NET MOVEMENT ON FUNDS BEING NET INCOME FOR THE YEAR 926 - 926 30,807TOTAL FUNDS AT 1 APRIL 2010 131,335 - 131,335 100,528 TOTAL FUNDS AT 31 MARCH 2011 132,261 - 132,261 131,335

This information is an extract from Albatross Arts Project (trading as Geese Theatre Company’s) Trustee’s Reportand Audited Accounts for year ended 31 March 2011. A copy of the full accounts is available upon request.


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Members of the Executive CommitteeSelwyn Blyth - Chair Iain Lownes - SecretaryChris Crocker Lee Fisher Jim Robinson Rose RuddickMelanie Whitehead

Members of the CompanyAndrew Watson - Artistic DirectorLouise Heywood - Deputy Artistic DirectorIrene BrownAdrian Dakers Kerry EllorYvonne GregoryEmma Smallman Jonathan Watson


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Woodbridge House, 9 Woodbridge Road, Birmingham, B13 8EHTel: 0121 449 6222 Fax: 0121 449 1333 Email: [email protected] Website: www.geese.co.uk

Albatross Arts Project trading as Geese TheatreCompany registered in England. Companynumber: 2182104. Charity number: 327563

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Geese Annual Review 2010/11