Apples and Snakes is England's leading organisation for performance poetry and spoken word. Our beneficiaries include everyone who comes to a live event or accesses a digital performance on line through our website and across other digital platforms. We also operate participation programmes that specifically benefit disadvantaged sections of the community including people suffering from mental health issues; prisoners and young offenders; black, Asian, minority ethnic and refugee communities as well as children and young people, particularly those who are economically disadvantaged. Our participation programmes have been shown to have a significant impact on the confidence and well-being of those involved, indeed we are currently writing a book with one of the groups we work with that will reflect on the success of our work in helping the participants to control their condition and provide a blueprint for other groups to follow. Our work in schools and youth groups also has an impressive success rate of engaging with the most disadvantaged who are often the most difficult to reach through conventional methods with evaluations showing that attendances and concentrations levels increased as a result of our programmes. We also provide training for spoken word artists who want to develop their writing, performance or workshop skills and run artist development programmes for young and more established artists that give them a chance to develop the skills required to create a career as full time poet.
Apples and Snakes stretches the boundaries of poetry in education and performance, by inspiring participation and giving voice to a diverse range of spoken word artists. We do this across three broad programme areas - performances, artist development and community and outreach. Performances range from open mic events that give members of the audience the opportunity to stand up and present their work, through headline events with some of the best performance poets from the UK and abroad to more theatrical lyrical shows that have a story to tell. Artist development programmes include from one to one develop sessions with one of our knowledgeable members or an experienced artist mentor, to more formal classroom based master classes with an experienced artist or appropriate expert leading a session on a particular artistic or business skill. We also run dedicated development programmes for young artists and sessions for more established artists that provide them with the opportunity to explore new work in collaboration with artists from other art forms. Our community and outreach programmes range from a one off half day workshops through to longer term residency projects that may include regular workshop sessions with the same group of participants over a number of weeks. We tailor our outreach programmes to the needs of the group we are working with to ensure that we create the right programme with the right artist to ensure that the participants get the outcomes that they need but that they also have fun in the process.
