Yet it is also important to construct and understand your difficult experience. Psychologist James W Pennebaker in his recent book ‘The Secret Life of Pronouns’ says that writing can help you construct a coherent story rather than just spill it out in a disorganised way which causes more long term stress. He continues:

‘If you catch yourself telling exactly the same story over and over again in order to get past your distress, rethink your strategy. Try writing or talking about your trauma in a completely different way. How would a more detached narrator describe what happened? What other way of describing the event might exist? If you are successful, research suggests you will sleep better, experience better physical health and notice yourself feeling happier and less overcome by your upheaval.’

Company Paradiso has, happily, learnt this week that the Arts Council of England has approved our funding for 2012. We will work at the Foyer in Slough for the next four months then in Sussex through to the end of the year. The Foyer houses 64 young people aged 16 to 25 who have no home or have had to leave home. Our project will encourage 20 young people to write about their difficult experiences. We shall, with consent, be analysing some of the writings with a Lingusitic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) computer programme. This will help us judge the effects of the project and also how to work with young people to make it more effective. (By the way, you can analyse your own writing using this kind of programme on Pennebacker’s website www.secretlifeofpronouns.com) In our project we hope that words can be tools to understand and stop disadvantage or trauma limiting life opportunities.

‘When people write about an experience they are changing the way that experience is organised in the brain.  Usually if people haven’t talked about the experience much they haven’t tied the event to other parts of their lives.  They often don’t see how it might be related to other changes that might have occurred to them.’

This echoes a caller to BBC Radio Sussex during our 2008 project with offenders who said:  ‘It was only when I started to understand my own story and the parts others played in it, good and bad, that I could move forward.’  Pennebaker has gone on over the last 20 years to develop a computer programme called LIWC (Linguistic Enquiry and Word Count) that analyses words people use across the spectrum:

‘To my surprise the words people were writing that were important were not the content words but the invisible function words.  Words like prepositions, pronouns, articles.  The way that people constructed a story was a predicator of health improvements.’

This research is of significant interest to Company Paradiso and I’m sure to many others working with disadvantaged people.  We plan to reference this work and research in our project early next year with 16 – 24 year olds living independently at Slough Foyer. It may help participants and staff to understand changes that occur and the reasons for doing the project.  It will also influence how we approach and evaluate our work, particularly as we try to convince health and education funders of its value, and deepen our understanding as workshop leaders. 

We’d love to locate someone in an education or social psychology capacity in this country doing similar work, perhaps with a knowledge of LIWC.  Or a postgrad interested in its development.  Any contacts or ideas for partnerships please let us know.

Tim Loughton,
Minister for Children and Families

This week I took three young people who have been through the care system to see Tim Loughton, Minister for Children and Families, at the Department of Education in London.  He had agreed to meet us following an interview we did with him as part of the ‘Handle With Care’ project back in May.

One of our young people had spent 6 months on the street age 16 in church grounds, sheds and a tent, before getting a room at The Foyer in Slough.  Next week she will begin a degree in Theology at Kings College, University of London.  An amazing story of achievement.  The young people talked on the journey about how to describe their backgrounds on CVs and university applications and she thought ‘living independently’ was the best way.  I don’t think it describes the half of it.

We got off at Westminster Underground station and walked past Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey to the Department of Education.  The Minister was very welcoming and keen to promote the interests of children in care.  He said it was shocking that only 7% of looked after children went to university and was definite it must change.  He answered the group’s questions thoroughly and seemed to be taking a lot of new initiatives through.  The group were all satisfied with his answers and impressed by how much was happening, though maybe too polite to say how exactly will we know that things have changed for the better and by what date? 

We presented him with three of the poems from our ‘Handle With Care’ project framed for his office and Andrew Peach, who was with us from BBC Radio Berkshire, read him one of these by a group from the Berkshire Children in Care Councils.  This seems to represent the emotion of children in care well and, we felt, to leave him with a message about the need for action as well as words:

            We love being together with friends
            We love freedom of speech
            And sunshine and social workers
            Who are punctual and people who know how to listen
            But
            We   hate   broken    promises.

Shaun Bailey, Conservative Ambassador of the Big Society in London believes the problem is that ’we watched the previous government talk up the rights for young people but with no mention of responsibilities.’ www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/riots-without-responsibility Again, I search my memory for a single time when I have encountered a youth offending officer or youth worker or teacher or arts worker not encouraging a sense of responsibility.  This is probably the main function of community work.

Michael Gove the Education Secretary was especially spooked on Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight.  For him it was simple: rioters are thugs and criminals who need harsh treatment by the law.  Any variation on this theme incensed him.  He and David Cameron are angry not so much about the destruction, fear and misery caused by the riots as by the forcing of the focus onto deprived areas like Tottenham.  They have revealed not the foggiest idea about education or progress in these areas.

Many of the young people I have worked with would, probably, have got involved in the rioting if it had been in their areas.  They are likely to have been on the streets anyway, they often feel discriminated against but most important feel that they don’t matter.  Most will have suffered distress and loss in their lives, sometimes extreme.  I believe investment in good youth and community work counteracts this distress and has succeeded in preventing this kind of outburst for many years.  But now everyone knows, including young people, that belief in investment in deprived areas has gone.  The American TV channel NBC asked a young man in Tottenham if rioting really achieved anything.  He replied ‘Yes, you wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?  Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, 2000 of us, all blacks and it was peaceful and calm and not a word in the press.  Last night there was a bit of riot and looting and look at you.’ http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201189105816840954.html   Young people seized a chance for mayhem, for the thrill of it, to be part of something and to feel that they mattered.

The reaction has been harsh.  Courts are sitting in Sunday sessions, the first time in history.  Gone is any voice of reason to say it is best we do all we can to keep young people out of prison.  Not just because of the huge financial cost – for a child, often more than £100,000 a year.  Our prisons are less equipped than ever to educate or transform, especially as numbers rise.  So many commentators this week have presented ‘lock them up’ as a satisfactory end to the story of the riots.  Rather, it’s the beginning of a story of a young person now with time behind them and a criminal record who will before long become once more part of our community.

I also like to keep things open. In our radio weeks, we try to prepare well but are often collecting material and making decisions right up to the last minute.

One of Jacque Lecoq’s sayings was (I’m paraphrasing) ‘If something comes up that’s better, change to that, right up to the minute you do it on stage.’

Often our best bits of radio,or our most interesting participants arrive at the last minute. It’s as if at that point suddenly you know exactly what you need.

This principle of collaborative working had inspired Theatre de Complicite, whose shows ‘A Minute Too Late’ and ‘More Bigger Snacks Now’ during 1984 – 85 had encouraged me to go to Lecoq in the first place.

I was at Manchester University Drama Department at the time and even there the lecturers understood, apparently since the days of Rick Mayall and Ade Edmundson in the late seventies, the importance of letting students get on with things themselves. A tradition of Monday night ‘Studio Group’ had grown up where you could choose a slot and do whatever you liked.

By the time I left Lecoq in 1988 I had decided with two other students Joy Merriman and Ezra Hjalmarsson to return to England and set up a theatre company.