Jo Collins...
Co-founder and Musical Director of the Chicken Shed Theatre Company

...and director Mary Ward created a theatre company with a difference - one built on the belief that the performing arts should be open to young people of all abilities.

Taking its name from the chicken shed that was its first home, the company now has 15 full time artistic staff, 15 support staff, some 800 members aged from five to about 30, and a waiting list of 2000. "We try to maintain a balance of people, the same balance as in society. Believe it or not, one in six people have some sort of special need," says Jo.

For the last four years, the Chicken Shed Theatre Company has been based at its purpose-built theatre in North London. The company recently held the Chicken Shed Inspiration Awards to recognise the public figures who have led and inspired it over the years. In the words of Trevor Nunn, who won the theatre award, Chicken Shed shows us a glimpse of a more perfect world.

What inspires you?
I have two main sources of inspiration.

One is the inspiration of people around me. Since I was very young, I’ve always felt potential in people and I get very frustrated when they don’t do anything about it or other people say that they don’t have this or they don’t have that. From whenever I can remember I was a bit of a discoverer of people. So in terms of me as a person and what I wanted to do in life, people are my inspiration.

My other main source of inspiration is music. Again, from very young, I responded very much to music of all kinds. I always sang, and I had my own band from the age of 11. I listen to a lot of music and I’m sure subconsciously that’s all hived away in the brain somewhere. I love melodies. I tend to be more inspired by music that moves me emotionally. It’s usually melodic, a melody that touches me.

Most of the time, I write music to words or to a particular theme. So my inspiration comes second to the inspiration of the person whose written the words - good words, inspirational words. And then something just happens in my head - the music just comes. I put it down to divine inspiration. I almost don’t take credit for it. I feel that I’m a vehicle for the music. It is completely intuitive. I can’t really express that stage - the way to express it is through the music.

So, people and music are my two main sources of inspiration.

Where do ideas come from?
From people. In Chicken Shed we have such a huge range of people. I think of that in terms of an artist who paints - we have a palette with twice as many colours as any other artist might have. So it is that huge range of colours, which are our people, that gives me inspiration in terms of what I want to do, what I want to see coming from those people, how I want to see a potential being realised in those people.

I might say, for example, I really feel that person has great comic timing, let’s do a piece that will bring that out. Or I might say that Mary, my partner, is brilliant at directing movement, so let’s do a mime piece. Initial inspiration from people is the starting point, which then gives me an idea of what to do, what to take on to the next stage.

In a wider sense, I’m a great lover of listening to the birds and looking at beautiful scenery and again that all goes into my head, and I’m sure subconsciously I also get ideas from that. I’m very much an observer of things around me. I’m not a blinkered person. I will stop and listen to a bird and love it, so presumably that is all going in and giving me ideas subconsciously.

Yes. I think we aren’t born with ideas. We are born with a brain which is receptive and we have a nature which is receptive to certain things more than other people and that makes us what we are. But unless we keep our senses open we will limit what we can then produce from those things around us.

What’s the best idea you’ve ever had?
The best idea I’ve ever had was to start Chicken Shed, definitely. I was a singer and writer. Mary’s background was teaching and directing. We met through working together at a youth club and we realised we had exactly the same idea. There are whole sections of society that are denied the opportunity to express themselves creatively. These aren’t necessarily people with physical disabilities. They might be people who have been under-achievers at school. We had the idea of setting up a theatre company that would be open to all these people - to everyone. That was our basic ideal and philosophy. It has never changed - it’s just got bigger and bigger.

What’s the secret of good communication?
For a start, it’s not to make it a secret. ‘Secret’ and ‘communication’ don’t sit happily alongside each other. Openness is the first step to communication. We talked earlier about openness of the senses. You have to be open in your thoughts about people. You can’t look at someone or meet them once and understand what they are about. So communication is obviously a two way process. You have to be open to what people have to communicate to you. If you take that as your starting point, that puts you in a much better situation to try and reciprocate and communicate back.

Some people make the mistake of saying that communication is something that you do to others. If, for instance, you go into a room full of people that know each other but don’t know you and the first thing you do is try to communicate to them, in many ways that’s the wrong way round. You should first try and understand what they are about and what they have to say before you try and get yourself across. That way you know you are directing your thoughts and feelings in the right direction.

If, for example, you go into a room and you assume they all talk English and you make a two hour speech and at the end of it you realise they’re all French, then you haven’t communicated!

Take, for example, people that are labelled ‘autistic’. It’s one of those labels that really doesn’t mean anything at all. What it seems to mean is that that person doesn’t communicate in a conventional way. It’s not a medical term, like cerebral palsy or Down’s syndrome. Really all it means is ‘I don’t understand this person’.

At Chicken Shed, we communicate with some people who, in the conventional sense of the word, have never communicated before in their lives. That necessitates a complete openness and a belief that these people have something to communicate. When people feel threatened in a world, as some people who are called autistic do feel, you have to give them your trust. You have to make them feel that whatever they do - and it may just be do, it may not be say - you understand and accept what that is.

Around that complete openness, it’s very important that you give people a framework within which to communicate. If it’s a completely blank canvas I don’t think human beings can operate. We all need some kind of framework to make us feel we’re part of something. We join groups to make us feel important, to make us feel that we can open ourselves up. I think that trust and that framework is essential for communication.

That’s right. You still go through the process of showing openness towards and trust in that person.

The other important thing is mixing different people together. Someone that seems to be able to communicate brilliantly, the typical outward going, able bodied all rounder, could lack a quality that a person with a very small amount of conventional communication has. Each rubs off on the other. That’s not goody goody - it’s a way to make a more effective world. Companies we’ve talked to can see how their business can operate more efficiently with this approach.

Yes, it’s a total parallel. Some forward thinking companies have asked us to look at devising workshops for them.

Who are your heroes?
I’m not one of those people who has one hero. I have many: Stevie Wonder, Lennon & McCartney, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mary Ward my partner...

They all have a real truth about them. A real sense of integrity - true, true integrity, which is so rare. You can listen to politicians and be inspired by their words, but do you really believe them? They’ll go and do something which makes you think, I was so impressed by you and now you’ve gone and done that. I remember, with Shirley Williams, I was always inspired by her and I really believed in her, and I may have said she’s a hero, and then she left the Labour Party, which kind of let me down a bit.

Those people I’ve mentioned haven’t let me down. Everything they do is what I felt about them.

You can have a length of time of being a hero. It isn’t necessarily forever. They can be a hero only for as long as they remain true to that thing about them which made them a hero to you in the first place.

Yes, they can be very transient. Sometimes you can have a fallen hero. I remember thinking that Jimi Hendrix was this heroic guitarist, as a youngster I really put him on a pedestal. Then I had occasion to meet him and everything was shattered. He was still a brilliant guitarist but I read more into it than that. I thought that he played with his soul and therefore he must be the kind of person who would communicate that in his values in life. He didn’t.

I’m sure there are heroes in science but it doesn’t touch me, I can’t relate to it. With heroes I think there must be a little bit of them in you for you to recognise and empathise with and be inspired by their heroic quality. In them, you see that bit of you heightened to an absolute perfect extreme.

If you were a brand who would you be?
Christianity. Because I think that what Christianity preaches is a good, moral, just, fair way of being a human being. To try and use that as a guideline to aspire to in your life, you can’t ask for more. I am a Christian, a Catholic, and I sometimes manage to adhere to some of those values in my life.

For you, it’s a set of values that are constant. You were talking about heroes as these transient things - people that you hope will live up to what you see in them. Whereas with Christianity it’s a set of values that don’t belong to a particular person but have a permanence.

Yes, it’s a benchmark. I think a lot of people wouldn’t want to attach the brand of Christian to what they do because it has the connotation of Christian with a big C. But so many people are Christian in the way they are with each other. But they’d die if you said they were a very Christian person because in the name of Christianity so much evil has been done, and still is.

Yes. Because with a big C, you either believe that this person lived 2000 years ago or you don’t and that shouldn’t matter because that isn’t what it’s about really.

Yes, to be a really successful brand you should communicate what is inside.

Communicate and live up to what is inside.

Yes. The Body Shop is a great brand because it has integrity. It’s far reaching - it’s not just about make up and things. It has a real integrity. Benetton, on the other hand, seems to put forward this ‘every one is equal’ idea, but I don’t believe in it. It’s very clever marketing, but to me it’s all surface.

What makes you get up in the morning?
My job. It’s the most fulfilling job in every way. It’s a microcosm of life, this theatre. You meet every kind of person, face every kind of challenge, have daily rewards - mini-miracles happening every day one way or another. The world is a world of people and these people are here. I have the great honour of influencing youngsters and hopefully of them carrying on the work we start here. I also have great musical fulfilment because I’m writing and sharing my creativity with other people. It’s an artistically rewarding and a people-rewarding life that I lead and I couldn’t ask for a better one.