Outreach Foundation Manual realised through
the International Relief Fund
In 2020, the Outreach Foundation, based in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, received a grant from the International Relief Fund of the Goethe-Institut, the German Federal Foreign Office and other foundations and cultural intermediary organisations. The grant made it possible to continue an intergenerational theatre project that had already been running for five years but would not have been possible in that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the five years leading up to the 2020 crisis, facilitator Gcebile Dlamini created intergenerational theatre works in which school-going children and youth at the Outreach Foundation Performing Arts Programme collaborated with older persons and people with disabilities at the Tswelopele Frail Care Centre. Each year, this intergenerational collaboration would result in a theatre work.
Because of the restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 lockdown, the project would have been cancelled in 2020, but with the aid of the Relief Fund Grant, it could be reformatted as a participatory film programme. While Gcebile Dlamini continued to lead the creative workshop process, the children in the after-school project and one of the auxiliary social workers from Tswelopele Frail Care Centre received training in filmmaking with cell phones. They were then mentored for eight weeks while they created films about their experiences during the lockdown.
The outcomes of this process are twofold: firstly, a film was put together from material submitted by the participants in the After School Programme and at Tswelopele. You can view the film here:
The second outcome is a handbook for practitioners of theatre: directors, facilitators, Applied Theatre students and professionals and others interested in advocating for, or engaging in, intergenerational performance practice. The manual is available for download here.
