ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the company’s use of performance, as opposed to concentrating on our more participatory groupwork projects, of which there has been much discussion. A detailed analysis of Geese’s performance work must consider some of the important factors which influence our decision making about those performances. The majority of our projects incorporate performance, whether it is an hour-long five-person full-mask piece, or a two-minute solo scene spontaneously created by a practitioner and integrated into a wider groupwork programme. Of course, a professional theatre company consisting of trained actors/practitioners who do not necessarily have experience of offending themselves, creating performances for offenders and about offenders’ lives can be seen as problematic. Something similar is true for Geese’s performance work in prisons: if the model is right, if it is true to life, and the audience invest in the characters and the world they inhabit because they recognise it, they will engage with what is being presented.
