Outreach
OUTREACH AND COMMUNITY RESPONSE WORK
While we are based in Newbridge, our outreach or community response work takes us all over the country. We are national in scope. We engage with groups in a variety of contexts and with a range of ages. If you would like to talk to us about developing a project with your organisation please get in touch.
YOUNG PEOPLE
We develop and run programmes in partnership with schools and youth projects for young people aged 11 to 19. These include:
- Drama workshop programmes for TY and other classes in secondary schools. They can be weekly workshops with the same class, once-off interactive visits, or short-term workshop programmes.
- Collaborations with community development and youth work organisations to offer thematic programmes of workshops to young people outside of school.
- Special once-off workshops and short projects with groups of young people on themes of gender, inclusion, the environment, and any topic the group wishes to explore.
- Training for staff working with young people in using theatre methods to help young people research, explore and express issues of importance to them.
SECONDARY SCHOOLS
We work regularly with secondary schools in Kildare and West Dublin. We are interested in expanding this work to any secondary school nationally where it might be possible for us to reach.
We can deliver weekly workshops to schools in the east midlands and possibly in the midlands. We could possibly deliver once off workshops and short programmes to schools anywhere in the country.
TY Drama
We work with some local schools to provide a weekly programme of drama for the Transition Year classes. This can be replicated in any school within travel range nationally. The programme builds confidence, opening young people up to the benefits of creative collaboration. It runs for a year, weekly, culminating in an in-house and informal showcase of work for an invited school audience in May.
Drama, Film and Theatre Studies
We were involved in the design and preparation of the Irish leaving Certificate subject Drama, Theatre and Film Studies.
Our DTFS programme helps teachers deliver components of the course to 5th and 6th year students. Our level of involvement varies depending on the needs of the school and of the teachers. It is best to contact us to find out more and explore options that might work for you and your school.
Leaving Cert Applied
The drama programme for LCA is developed with the teacher who best knows the needs and capacity of the students. The programme generally aims to increase students abilities to collaborate, and help them practice transferrable skills (such as managing impulses, using information, focusing, deferring gratification etc). A comprehensive talk about these ideas can be viewed in one of our educational videos linked here.
Junior Cycle Drama
This project is for students who might develop confidence and positive self-esteem through participation in drama over the course of the year. They will be from different years in the school’s Junior Cycle classes.
The aim of the programme is to:
- increase self-esteem and confidence
- build social skills
- develop life skills experienced in drama (decision-making, dealing with impulses, collaboration, etc
- express themselves and their ideas
- feel safe
- develop positive self-image
- learn about channelling impulses and disciplining energy.
In general, we are flexible and adaptable and can collaborate to provide bespoke theatre-making experiences for young people based on the needs and aspirations of the school, the students and the teachers.
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS
We are available to collaborate with youth and community development organisations nationwide to deliver theatre workshops tailored to specific groups. These include programmes with young people, adults, refugees and migrants, ethnic minority groups and organisations, people with disabilities, and senior citizens. We are not qualified to work with groups of recovering addicts or to offer any kind of drama therapy to groups or to individuals. Our drama work puts the focus on social, cultural and environmental forces while in order to locate individual’s stories and experiences in a social-cultural content.
We work with a number of groups who would consider themselves to be minorities in Irish society, or who would generally be though of as having fewer opportunities than their peers. These include specially designed drama projects with young people who identify as LGBTQIA+. One of these is a project called Indigo, which began life as a youth exchange in Athens in 2018 and evolved into an annual programme of work with young people. Each year culminates with an Erasmus+ youth Exchange in Spain called Prism.
Another project is in collaboration with Wexford Local Development to deliver a 12 week drama programme to young people as part of their long-running Elevate and Meitheall programmes.
Several projects are celebrating women and their experiences and ideas. These include a collaboration with Newbridge Women’s Shed and our own Houselights project. Weekly drama workshops are designed to be fun, engaging and a space for the participants to share what is important to them. They come together under our international Erasmus+ project, Le Chéile, which celebrates theatre in adult education.
We have developed programmes and projects for people of all ages who have additional needs or a disability. These range from weekly workshops in primary schools like St Mark’s in Newbridge, to international projects like EPIPA which integrates people with and without disabilities in the same drama programme. One of our long-term collaborators is Kare, an organisation that supports and advocates for people with intellectual and physical disabilities. With them we run QQI accredited drama projects.
We have a collaborative, weekly drama project with the St Vincent de Paul in Newbridge who manage the Newbridge Day Care Centre for the Elderly and our Senior Citizens. We are interested in developing other drama projects with seniors in the region.
Our drama work with and on behalf of migrants, refugees, international protection applicants, and asylum seekers has been ongoing since 2003. There are usually once-off projects that combine drama with English language learning, or building confidence and assisting with social integration. Our team have worked on projects like Among Us, a project that used theatre, personal and social development, and language learning to help newly arrived IPA residents to integrate to our community. Another project was Is Mise Éire Eile, a play that toured Ireland, performed by migrants and that told the stories of IPA residents along with the stories of local residents who were impacted by the arrival of the IPAs.
We are eager to collaborate with organisations across the country to develop projects in these fields or with other youth and community groups not mentioned here. Contact us to enquire.
CONFERENCES
From time to time we develop performances for conferences around the country. We have a long and proud tradition of creating bespoke theatre and film for conferences and events. We make the performances to capture some of the conference theme or research, and present it early in the shcedule in order to provide dynamism and embodied content to the work.
We have been doing this since the 1990s, for a range of organisations such as Trócaire, Maynooth University (several conferences and events), AONTAS, Léargas, Then National Women’s Council of Ireland, Maynooth Community Council, and various government departments.
A recent example is a piece we made and filmed for a national online conference with a global reach. Our piece was If You’re Seeing This.
We usually need a long lead in time to consult, devise and prepare a performance. Contact us to see if we can help with your event or conference.
TRAINING
Crooked House provides training in a wide range of theatre related areas. Many of these are supported by the Erasmus+ programme which facilitates us to develop training programmes (usually a week long) for staff, volunteers and cultural workers in methodologies that we have developed in the area of applied theatre. These include training programmes abroad like the AkAna training is using theatre to work with young people; or the Fíorscéalta training programme exploring ways to use devised theatre with non-actors, especially with youth.
Other training is provided by long-term Erasmus+ projects such as Ignition, which develops resources and a training course that organisations can use to train drama facilitators. Dilemma is a multi-cultural and international project in which we create and share free resources for using theatre with groups as an educational programme about gender-based violence.
Our resources for youth workers include a project called Drama For Youth Work is a collection of free games and activities that youth workers can use to explore social and political issues. Another is Digital Drama Workshops, which is a set of complete drama workshops that can be delivered online. It is accompanied by videos exploring theory and ideas of youth theatre.
Please get in touch if your organisation would like to explore how we can develop theatre based training that is relevant to your group’s or staff’s needs.
Enquiries
info[at]crookedhouse[dot]ie or Oguzhan Sahin oguzhan[at]crookedhouse.ie to discuss your ideas.