download - Music in Prisons

4 TIME WELL SPENT
ACHIEVEMENT
Achievement comes at all stages of practice and rehearsal, getting its final acknowledgement
through the performance and acclaim from peers, prison staff, audience and professionals.
• being able to sing in front of a big crowd
• learning not to strain the voice
• learning to project my voice
• learning to make eye contact with the audience
• working on something that is so professional
• the quality of it showed me that I have made progress.
(Fair’s Fair 2000)
REHEARSAL
The rehearsals provide the professional structure to pull the strands of the project and the
participants together, but can equally prove to be the most challenging time for both the project
leaders and the individual participants.
“We learnt a lot, we improved our skills and got to work with new people…To take part in
this means I can say I’ve worked with these people and this can be part of my work portfolio.
This will be my third experience – and I loved it.” Young offender (YO)
(Fair 2005)
We put the carnival music with the dance and at one point (for the first time) everyone was
active… we then went over the rest of the songs with moderate success. The girls hate waiting
around for reasonable things like setting up instruments and finding song words. They
‘strop’ off saying we are wasting their time and then more time is wasted as we try and coax
them back.
Project Team diary (Fair 2005)