Art Shape – grant recipient - Barnwood Trust

Art Shape – grant recipient

Enabling people to speak up and speak out

Art Shape is a Gloucestershire-based organisation working to combat exclusion from the arts.

It has a particular focus on adults facing barriers to participation, such as older people, asylum seekers, refugees, and people with mental health issues or learning disabilities.

Making important concepts accessible

Funding from Barnwood Trust helped Art Shape to develop an innovative project for adults with learning disabilities, designed to explore the principles of advocacy and self-advocacy through drama and role play.

The project was led by artist Harriet West, who worked with drama practitioners Stephen Deproost and Sara Clee to devise a programme of 12 drama sessions involving participants from five Adult Opportunity Centres across Gloucestershire.

Braving a leap of imagination

Participants were encouraged to make up their own stories or act out scenes from familiar narratives such as Cinderella, discussing advocacy issues as they arose.

‘Cinderella is a brilliant advocacy story’ explains lead artist Harriet: ‘you’ve got bullying; someone being put upon to do everything... Every good story has a problem – that’s how we come to the issues.’

Harriet has seen how effective these role play exercises can be:

‘You can play a scene where everybody improvises and then you can say ‘now what went wrong? Let’s stop that. If so- and-so had spoken up or spoken differently what would have happened then?’ And we play it all out again to explore the consequences and the what-ifs.’

Some sessions also used a chat show format, in which characters from familiar stories are interviewed about their decisions and actions.
For example, somebody interviews Cinderella and says ‘Why don’t you stand up for yourself?’

Reaching a wider community

One of the outputs of the project is a self-advocacy toolkit, comprising video clips from the sessions and guidelines on discussing the rules and concepts of advocacy.

This will enable the learning to percolate – and a greater number of people with learning disabilities to benefit.

‘Awareness-raising is going to be a big part of the project’ says Harriet; ‘not just for people with learning disabilities, but people who look after them and the wider public.’

For more information about Art Shape, visit www.artshape.co.uk

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