Stories of Resilience: Out Of Hand Theater

As we approach and pass the one-year mark since the COVID-19 pandemic caused nationwide lockdowns, South Arts is reflecting on our constituents who have worked tirelessly to overcome new challenges and reimagine their work. Throughout March 2021, South Arts will be running a series of articles penned by our program participants and grant recipients exploring how their work has changed in response to the pandemic.

Atlanta's Out of Hand Theater, in partnership with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, is a recent Cross-Sector Impact Grant recipient, supporting their Equitable Dinner series. Using facilitated conversations in people's homes in conjunction with brief performances, Equitable Dinners raise conversations about social justice and equity. As the pandemic caused an abrupt halt to in-person gatherings, Out of Hand Theater was able to radically reinvent the series and find the path to deep, meaningful partnerships.

The following article was written by Ariel Fristoe, Artistic Director for Out of Hand Theater

We couldn't have done all of this without the support of South Arts. We were able to leverage South Arts' Cross Sector Impact Grant and a sponsorship from Mailchimp to raise the funds for the first 18 months of Equitable Dinners online. The idea of cross sector impact is at the very heart of our work: Out of Hand works at the intersection of art, social justice, and community engagement, and for us, this means designing and implementing all of our programs with community partners.

Out of Hand Theater: Leading conversations on equity, one dinner at a time.

When the world shut down, Out of Hand was on the verge of launching Equitable Dinners: Atlanta, 500 potluck dinners for 5,000 diverse strangers in one month with a facilitated conversation about race and equity at each table ignited by the live performance in every room of a 10-minute play about being Black in Metro Atlanta. Equitable Dinners: Atlanta was an outgrowth of Decatur Dinners, the event we produced in 2019, where 1,200 people gathered on one night, in homes, community centers, and places of worship with a performance in every room sparking facilitated dialogue on race over dinner.

After the Shelter in Place order, the Equitable Dinners design team met on Zoom to talk. It's an incredible team, representing the Equitable Dinners partners: National Center for Civil and Human Rights (our partner on the Cross-Sector Impact Grant), The King Center, and Partnership for Southern Equity, plus a handful of other champions for racial justice. That day, we made a plan to go online, and Equitable Dinners: Setting the Table for Racial Equity was born. We launched in April, just a month after everything came to a halt, and since then, we have produced a free, online, monthly, online series featuring art, experts, and conversation. Every month, we address a different racial equity topic with a guest speaker, the performance of a new 10-minute play written in consultation with the speaker, and facilitated, small-group conversations in Zoom breakout rooms.

Equitable Dinner - Zoom window
Equitable Dinner - Zoom gallery
Equitable Dinner

We have already produced 10 months of programs, with topics ranging from racial equity and health, to racial equity and education, poverty, housing, food, and voting rights, among others. Over 4,000 people have attended, from 11 countries, 40 states, and 98 Georgia cities and towns, and another 2,000 have watched on Facebook Live. Of survey respondents, the majority are women, but they are wonderfully diverse in race and age, with 58% white and 42% Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, and an almost even spread of people under 40, in their 40s, in their 50s, in their 60s, and over 70. 86% say the event caused them to think more deeply about racial equity, and 85% say it made them more likely to take anti-racist action. The Equitable Dinners monthly series will continue at least until the end of 2021, and probably much longer.

Years ago, when we made the commitment to focus Out of Hand's work on social justice and community partnerships and all but stop producing traditional theater, it seemed clear this meant giving up on winning awards or increasing our budget. Most of our programs, including Equitable Dinners, are free to the public, and organizations like Atlanta's Suzi Bass Theatre Awards probably don't know what to make of shows in people's homes paired with conversation about social justice. But an amazing thing happened: Decatur Dinners was covered by NPR's All Things Considered, Equitable Dinners received a glowing review in American Theatre Magazine, and we appeared in The New York Times four times in 2020, including winning The New York Times Best Theater of 2020. What's more, when we reached out to Atlanta companies and schools asking them to sponsor the Dinners or share our events with their communities, they started asking if they could hire us. Equitable Dinners at Work was born, providing custom breakfast and lunch programs on Zoom for organizations including BlackRock, Coca-Cola, Emory, Hands On Atlanta, and United Way, and helping to double our annual budget during the pandemic. The call for more, in-depth training for our facilitators and clients also resulted in the creation of our Institute for Equity Activism, six full days of training over months on Appreciative Inquiry, Cultural Competency, Race Equity, Art as Social Justice Activator, and Transformational Facilitation.

We couldn't have done all of this without the support of South Arts. We were able to leverage South Arts' Cross Sector Impact Grant and a sponsorship from Mailchimp to raise the funds for the first 18 months of Equitable Dinners online. The idea of cross sector impact is at the very heart of our work: Out of Hand works at the intersection of art, social justice, and community engagement, and for us, this means designing and implementing all of our programs with community partners. We use our skills as artists to serve our partners' goals, and our programs almost always contain our special recipe of information to open minds, art to open hearts and put a human face on data and statistics, and conversation to process information and emotions and make a plan for action.

We are still planning to gather 5,000 people for potluck dinners in Atlanta homes when it's safe to do so. Our goal is still to assemble a critical mass of Atlanta residents in one big event to support a cultural shift toward anti-racism. We miss the magic of breaking bread with strangers, the automatic boost in respect, empathy, and dignity that comes with being a host or a guest in someone's home; the reason we designed these events as dinners in the first place. But we also recognize that if things had gone as planned, we would never have reached such a broad array of people or grown our programs so spectacularly. Equitable Dinners, Equitable Dinners at Work and the Institute for Equity Activism will probably provide some programming online from now one, and this brave new world will permit us to reach more people in more places, with social justice-driven programs combining information and small-group conversation, driven by the empathy-building power of art.

Be part of the path to Resilience

Donations from a variety of sources including individuals, corporations and foundations make the meaningful work of South Arts possible. Please join us today.

Make a Donation