Karin and Alison are busy with training. We are delighted to be training lots more care staff in Lancashire through our ongoing partnership with Lancashire Workforce Development Partnership. Our courses, Experiencing Dementia and Introduction to Life Story Work are going really well. One young male care assistant said to us “I never thought I’d be able to understand how people with dementia feel, but after today I really feel I can”. This is the kind of feedback that inspires us and keeps us going!

As part of her Creative Wales journey, Alison had a fantastic visit to Northern Ireland to meet Teya Sepunick, director of the inspirational Theatre of Witness and see some of her work. Teya has been creating performances with people’s real life stories for over 20 years in the US and Europe.

We are getting excited about our new theatre project, Age, which will be created over the next 2 months at Chapter. We will be exploring what it’s like to grow old in 2013? Does an awareness of time affect our lives in the here and now? Do our dreams and desires change? What do our older performers have to say about ageing and all that comes with it? 

This June we are delighted to be participating in the Culture, Health and Wellbeing International Conference in Bristol. We are looking forward to connecting with other arts practitioners from around the globe. We are particularly excited that Dr Uchide, who Karin travelled to Japan to work with and learn from in 2010 will be speaking alongside Karin at the conference. Dr Uchide is an international leader in the field of creative approaches to dementia care and an inspiring woman not to be missed!

Alison has been awarded a Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales. She is delighted to receive this prestigious award and is looking forward to spending time reflecting on the work of Re-Live and engaging with other practitioners, including Michael Balfour and Sarah Woodland from Griffith University, Australia, and leading social action theatre company, Collective Encounters.

Thanks so much to everyone who came to see Abandoned Brothers last month at Chapter. It has been a rollercoaster of a journey. We have been humbled by the determination and strength of the veterans and family members we met along the way. The stories in the final performance were just a fraction of what we have heard over the past three months. We have listened, laughed, cried, at times wondered where it was all going, but what drove this project on was the insistence of our group that theirs is a story which needs to be told. The moment of hearing those stories shared with an audience was really something

This autumn, we are launching our Life Story Training with support from the Arts Council of Wales and The Baring Foundation. Life Story work is an exciting and creative way of working which celebrates the person and their unique life story. Our training courses will show people how to implement life story work in hospitals, care homes, prisons, veterans’ support groups, hospices, community arts settings and theatres.

We've got a week to go till Abandoned Brothers opens at Chapter. At the moment it feels about as scary as theatre can get. We're creating documentary theatre. There is no safety barrier of fiction. This is real-life and the emotions our performers are going through are raw and painful. Today one of our performers re-enacted the moment he pleaded with a psychiatrist to help him as he was scared of going home and what he might do

We are launching our 2012 training programme this month. Supported by the Arts Council of Wales and The Baring Foundation, this training programme enables us to draw together the learning of our work over the past 6 years

We are in the research stage of a brand new project which seeks to explore the experience of war and the impact it has on the lives of those who go through it. We feel there is an urgency to capture the stories of men and women who experienced World War Two, as in the near future there will be no-one left to pass on these experiences first-hand.