Fantastic for Families Award 2021 Nominee

Co-creation, Innovation and Partnerships with Elders:
Royal Exchange Theatre

Nominated for the Best Age Friendly Outreach in the Fantastic for Families Awards 2021, the Royal Exchange Theatre supported their Elders Company creative community to bring their activity online during the pandemic, stay connected and creative! Andy Barry from the Royal Exchange Theatre tells us about the extraordinary activity of the Elders Company since the pandemic began.

Growing our Elders Company by utilising digital opportunities and working in partnership

Innovation has always been at the heart of the Royal Exchange Theatre’s Elders Company. The Elders is a creative community of older people interrogating the idea ‘everyone is an artist’ and making ambitious pieces of theatre. By taking part, older people build confidence and social connections helping to combat loneliness and increase feelings of being valued. The Elders is also about challenging ageism.

When our Theatre closed in 2020, it was essential this work continued, we adapted by:

reinventing our programme to go online
supporting older people with technology
empowering older people to make theatre in this new digital world
working in partnership to reach more vulnerable older people

From March 2020 we regularly supported over 100 people in weekly online workshops.

Staying connected was vital, but so was remaining creative and making theatre. Since March 2020 the Elders have created original digital outcomes and had opportunities to work with 14 professional creatives including older professional artists. We also developed two phone-based projects. The first, PHONE A FRIEND supported members who were struggling to access online sessions to stay connected and creative. The second, WE’LL BE IN TOUCH, saw us partner with Together Dementia Support to engage older people living with dementia in a creative poetry-making project over the phone.

Through our initial digital support, we empowered a community of older people to initiate their own daily Zooms. Five members have grown to 28 who’ve regularly met every day since 24 March 2020 (including Christmas day!). These ‘Artistic Activists’ have now created six films and published a poetry anthology called Elders Unmuted, documenting their experiences of life in lockdown. The anthology has also raised over £1000 for the Theatre’s Arts Pot (a fund to support everyone to take part in our activities). As well as learning digital skills, both outputs are an important archive of life in lockdown for older people.

In July 2021, we created an intergenerational production called WIT & WISDOM, the show involved a company of 25 Elders and Young Company members, including a live band. The production was created with the Company mostly on Zoom with final rehearsals and performances socially distanced in the Theatre.

What we learnt…

By encouraging autonomy and inspiriting creative ambition as part of our Elders Company programme, we have been able to support our graduate members to realise their own artistic projects. It is great seeing people flourish, and it also means we can create space within the programme for new people to get involved, while still supporting our existing members.

We learnt to develop projects alongside our participants, but also evolve projects to do different things for different people. All too often older people are seen as one homogenous group. Some of the older people we were working with reached a point during lockdown where they wanted new challenges and to be pushed further out of their comfort zone. Being able to involve them in training, to lead creative phone calls was a great way to provide this challenge.

Our Elders Leaders programme is an important strand of work, that provides training and mentorship for some Company members. Working as volunteers, the Leaders give input into the development of the programme, support online and in-person sessions, champion the Company and take the lead in initiating their own projects with other graduates.

“We learnt to develop projects alongside our participants, but also evolve projects to do different things for different people.”

What this nomination means to us…

Being nominated in this category means a great deal to us as a Theatre, but also a huge amount to the older people we work with. Our Elders feel valued, seen and heard. For all its challenges, the lockdowns created opportunities for us to work in new ways and to reach new people via our creative telephone service. It’s exciting and rewarding to be recognised for what we have been able to achieve, in spite of it having been a really difficult year for everyone.

Next Steps

Covid 19 has greatly impacted the organisation, but we remain ambitious. We have just recruited a brand new Elders Company of 19 people aged 60-82 and we continue to regularly support our 65 graduates aged 60-87 to take part with us and initiate their own creative projects. Our Elders Mondays programme also offers regular opportunities to take part and is a great first step to becoming involved for many more people.

Some of our online sessions are now taking place back in the building. Moving forward we anticipate a blended approach of online and in-person sessions. We feel this approach will be really key to keep in touch with people who may not always be able to access our building.

We also have plans to extend our creative phone service WE’LL BE IN TOUCH, to work with more partner organisations and support not just people living with dementia but also older people at greater risk of social isolation.

We are currently in the process of supporting our new Elders Company members online, even though their sessions are currently in-person. Understanding people’s digital capabilities now, could prove critical later on.

10 November 2021

FURTHER INFORMATION

royalexchange.co.uk/the-elders

Andy Barry, Elders Programme Producer

Andy is a theatre director who leads the Elders Company for the Royal Exchange Theatre.

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