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Community Arts Services

  Qualification Guide

Meet the Workshop Leaders

Join us on SANe:
The Social Arts Network

THE BRIDGE

Our Model of Socially Inclusive Arts Practice

Click on area of the Bridge to find out more

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge for Escape Artists is to provide a clearly signposted and well managed route for our clients, enabling them to move from the margins of society to the mainstream. In order to meet this challenge the company is developing a rolling two year programme through which all the elements necessary to bring about an individual’s social inclusion are brought together. This holistic model for social inclusion through the arts we call 'the Bridge'. At the end of a journey across the Bridge, the aim is for clients to find employment within the cultural industries. This could be in any capacity: from working as a stage technician, roadie, or makeup artist, through to finding employment as an actor, workshop leader, administrator or mentor.

However, employment is not the sole outcome of the services provided. Escape Artists is aware that involvement with arts based projects can play a critical role in the personal development of excluded people (as indeed, with all people), and is instrumental in increasing confidence and self-esteem, improving capacity for collaboration, social interaction and self-presentation. Escape Artists recognises how participating in high quality arts activities develops a stronger sense of pride and achievement, and encourages clients to pursue education and training opportunities and to build up lasting support networks.

The Bridge, therefore, exists to ensure that socially marginalised people have an access route into the arts, and, furthermore, to ensure that - for those who have (or who are able to develop) the necessary skills, and who have the commitment - a structure is there that can provide them with long term bespoke support: enabling, although never guaranteeing, a route back to the mainstream.

Unlike many organisations that offer training we aren't too hung up about failure (in a sense, we expect it). We are delighted when our clients are successful, but we recognise that for many of our clients simply being involved in the arts can be an end in itself. There doesn't always have to be a progression to something else. Many of our clients come to us, enjoy themselves, state that they want to get on the Bridge, and then promptly fall off. We have got used to this. The important thing for us is to provide continuity of service and support. Our job is to be there so that, for instance, when a down and out, ex-prisoner has fallen off the Bridge for the fifteenth time we are still there when they want to have another crack at getting across. We will do our utmost to ensure that no one is ever excluded from attempting to travel along the Bridge.

In the words of Samuel Beckett:

Ever tried,
Ever failed,
No matter,
Try again,
Fail again,
 Fail better.

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Find out more about our approach to working with arts practitioners

Do you have the skills to run one or more of our arts practitioner training courses? If so, we'd like to hear from you. Find out more...

Call Lottie Ettling on 020 7655 0909 for details about all our practitioner training courses.

How to find us

If you do not wish to register for a course at this time, but you would like to be kept informed about our upcoming training courses, then please add your name to our email Training List.

The Escape Artists Practitioner Training Programme has been developed with the support of the Monument Trust and the Wates Foundation