RESCUED FROM THE STREETS

Well, it started because I am homeless and I am still homeless. I was staying in a hostel and Cardboard Citizens helped me. What they do is a taster and they send out a worker to all different hostels in London and around, and come and show what they're doing and invite people to come down to their weekly workshops to play around. When your homeless there's not much you can do really, some hostels are quite scary places and you get more depressed and stuff, so I said well, I've got nothing to lose, I'll go down there. I went down to the workshop and it was really fun. Once a year they do a workshop for five days, they pay your fare down there and give you £5 lunch money, so I thought yes, why not have some fun. After you do the five days in the workshop then you can apply for the Company. They do two productions a year, one tour is a hostel tour, they go around England doing a show to all hostels. The second tour is a school tour and they go round schools.

Well, it started because I am homeless and I am still homeless. I was staying in a hostel and Cardboard Citizens helped me. What they do is a taster and they send out a worker to all different hostels in London and around, and come and show what they're doing and invite people to come down to their weekly workshops to play around. When your homeless there's not much you can do really, some hostels are quite scary places and you get more depressed and stuff, so I said well, I've got nothing to lose, I'll go down there. I went down to the workshop and it was really fun. Once a year they do a workshop for five days, they pay your fare down there and give you £5 lunch money, so I thought yes, why not have some fun. After you do the five days in the workshop then you can apply for the Company. They do two productions a year, one tour is a hostel tour, they go around England doing a show to all hostels. The second tour is a school tour and they go round schools.

The Company is made up of homeless people, or people who have been homeless, or in hostels, situations like that. How it works is we have about three to four weeks of us coming in to workshops, bringing our real stories, bringing our experiences, characters we've met and presenting them to each other. We have a general theme that we are working on and we focus on that basically. The Director picks out stories, experiences and characters. We distort them slightly and we make a production based on that. We are all collective in that process, although the Director does actually write half of the draft, we give the information and bring the characters and it is real situations. At the end of the three to four weeks we should have some kind of script together and then we go on a tour presenting that, this tour is for fifteen weeks.

The forum theatre side is a type of theatre. It's very modern and was developed by a Brazilian, Augustus Bower, who calls it "theatre of the oppressed", and he developed it in Brazil, basically to have a political say and get people politically conversing. We have taken those issues and apply them to ourselves with homelessness and the issues around homelessness, what we're dealing with in a city, loneliness, getting back to work, getting our lives together. We take those themes and create the piece basically.

We do a hostel tour, go round the hostels and present the performance, and then replay the performance at double time asking the audience to take part in stopping it and changing any situation that they think could have been dealt with differently, re-acting it themselves and hopefully, working through their own problems; they are probably familiar with lots of the situations because they're homeless as well. We get them to change it, create a whole different story and hopefully, deal with problems that they are dealing with at that moment. We get insight of different ways of handling and doing things, and changing the outcome hopefully, to a happier ending. We don't make it easy for them, we remain in our characters because life isn't like that, you don't just say: I want a better shot and you get it, no, you have to try a lot harder than that. It isn't easy for them but they do come up on stage, we get a really good response, people do come up because they are familiar with the issues, loads of the situations have happened to them and they change them on the stage.

For me, taking part in this project is just like a life-saver, you know, in my situation being homeless. I was in a hostel with loads of women which also had a mental health department, so it was very depressing and I felt very isolated. I don't have a mental health problem and so it was like how do I get back involved in Society, how do I find my way back? Cardboard Citizens really provided that outlet for me. I am in this tour, I could well be chosen for another tour, I'm not sure, but it has given me a lot of confidence and self-esteem. I am working again, I am no longer signing on, I've taken a shared accommodation, I am still homeless, but now I'm only sharing with 8 other women and I'm still on the housing list waiting to be re-housed. It is a brilliant experience for me so far, we're two weeks into the tour so we've got another nine weeks to go. We're travelling, I've met loads of other people, people in the cast as well as just travelling to others, and seeing so many other people in the same situation as you, or maybe even worse. It's just such a confidence booster and you don't feel so isolated and lonely on your own.