On Wednesday night the Islington Giving and UnLtd teams were at the Business Design Centre in Angel for an event to celebrate the UnLtd Islington Giving challenge that handed out its first round of grants to Islington residents with ideas to make a positive difference in Islington. We’ll have more on the event shortly but for now we’ve been catching up with one of the award winners, Lorraine Grout who is developing the Flight for Freedom project. Lorraine explained to us her idea and some of the challenges in making it happen. Over the next few months we’ll be following Lorraine and the other winners and their projects so watch this space…
Why did you decide to get involved?
I am a resident of Islington and my family have lived in Islington for over a hundred years. I am passionate
abou tcreating theatre and working with groups that may not have any experience or access to this transformative art form. I am particularly interested in establishing projects in my own community and working closely with people to promote better understanding of themselves, and how they are perceived by others.
So…what is your project?
My project is called “Flight of Freedom” a therapeutic, drama and performance project designed specifically to work with marginalized groups under a shared aspiration to produce truthful, compelling, insightful performances. My project aims to use simple and easily obtained resources to surround and magically transport our audiences, with insights into worlds they may previously have thought of but never known. This unique approach will involve a colaboration with artist Alex Mckenzie to engineer visually beautiful, giant paper, pop-up sets to create a stunning background for our participants’ stories. The final performance is an opportunity to discover the effectiveness of such a project with the participants and the audience.
In this first project I aim to work with offenders from HMP Pentonville’s Health Care Unit, where I will trial practices in workshop delivery and audience engagement. This first project will experiment creating a jury style model audience of a diverse group of local people. I am proposing to invite residents from all the surrounding estates of HMP Pentonville such as; Boston Estate & Caledonian Estates. Our invited audience will sit amongst the general audience and will commit to being part of our project. Pre-performance they will agree to tell us something about themselves, and their views towards offenders and criminal justice arts. Post Performance they will allow us to record their views and responses to the performance and overall project. In order for offenders to move on they need to return to communities that can support their development.
How will this project help?
The re-offending rates are significant to every community, currently 75% of young offenders re-offend and 60% of adult offenders re-offend within the first year of release. The aim is to create a project that tackles some of the
issues surrounding offending behaviour in order to interrupt the cycle of offending in a creative and positive manner. Within the performance project we hope to publicly challenge some of the stigmas attached to the marginalised
groups we will be working with.
What are your biggest challenges and how could people help you?
I will believe the project is happening when I am running my first warm-up game in Pentonville. There is always a risk of a cancellation working in prisons. Priorities can change very quickly in these volatile places. It is important to stay in contact with the right people inside to provide the necessary reassurances that will secure the project so everything runs smoothly.
I am a typical arts educated person and really need support in developing my business model. I want to create a company that succeeds in creating valuable work for the social sector that is sustainable and not always dependent on the next grant.
I have lots of ideas of how Paper Dog productions could work; creating volunteer opportunities in the surrounding local community, training staff in prisons’, taking-on ex-offenders to work on future projects, offering placements to universities for students wishing to know more about theatre in prisons, utilising corporate social responsibility scheme’s to get big business involved in rehabilitation……
But most of all I want to be involved in providing offenders with a beautiful picture that they will never forget. A moment they felt positive enough to want to change. Who knows what is possible? In an ideal world we could be working with early release offenders and helping to secure housing, training or job opportunities by inviting an audience which are able to offer this kind of support.
I will be working with Alex, the artist involved, during half term to begin building and experimenting with the giant pop-up sets. Securing the remaining budget for the Pentonville project is still my biggest obstacle. I am keen to get on as soon as I achieve this.
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