Our Health and Care offer

Vamos Theatre began working alongside the Health and Care sectors in 2013 during the development of Finding Joy, our award-winning production about dementia, and since then over 80,000 people have experienced our Health and Care workshops and performances. Our unique approach engages people to think differently about ways of caring and approaches to health and well-being and our success in supporting skills development led to major two year Arts Council England funding to spread our work more widely.

Current research shows the many positive effects that involvement in the arts has on those receiving care; including improved cognitive processes, attention, stimulation of memories and enhanced communication. This, in turn, has positive effects on families and carers, and the quality of the care environment.

We have two decades of experience in physical and non-verbal training. We are passionate about supporting new models of community-based, person-centered care by providing training and performances within an ethos of empathy, listening, acceptance, and playfulness. We believe that training is most successful, and skills are sustained, when learning is experiential, emotional and enjoyable.

With funding from Arts Council England, through our Strategic Touring Project during 2017-19, we were able to expand our work; supporting care homes, communities and organisations to become dementia friendly places, made up of dementia-skilled and dementia-aware people.

Vamos Theatre is proud to be a member of the Dementia Action Alliance and to have been a finalist in the Dementia Care Awards 2021.

We teach more than competence in communication: we help to show how to listen and observe, how to build relationships and trust, and how to behave with compassion and empathy. We enable those who learn with us to see the whole person with whom they are connecting, and not simply the health or care problem.