From IAMO4W to Equitable Dinners:
Out of Hand’s Unexpected Journey of Audience Building

By Ariel Fristoe, Artistic Director, Out of Hand Theater

I want to share something extraordinary and unexpected that came out of Out of Hand Theater’s audience building journey. Out of Hand works at the intersection of art, social justice, and civic engagement. We spark conversations to build a better world by using the tools of theater to support and enhance the work of community partners. Through the generosity of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, we have taken several steps on our audience building journey, starting with our neighborhood, Old Fourth Ward. 

Out of Hand dived deep into The Essential Journey of Audience Building by seeking to understand the points of view and needs of the residents of our neighborhood. Our plan was to interview our neighbors and find out about their hopes, fears, needs, and wishes. We gathered a group of theater makers, and designed IAMO4W (I Am Old Fourth Ward): an interactive, data-gathering community meal, designed by artists. The essential components of IAMO4W were art, a shared meal, and facilitated conversation among diverse strangers.

Our secondary goal was to invite people who live in the same small neighborhood but are divided by race, wealth, or education to have a positive, meaningful interaction. Atlanta is famous around the world as the home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of Hand is based in Dr. King’s own neighborhood. We would use our skills as artists to work with our neighbors to help build the Beloved Community, to build audience for the arts, and to make artists vital to our community.

The priorities that surfaced through IAMO4W were promoting our history, and the need for affordable housing to preserve the character of the neighborhood. Based on these, we developed Theater Bus, a theatrical tour of the MLK Historic District, exploring the story behind the story of Atlanta’s civil rights legends, and the historic sights, sounds and tastes of our city’s most treasured neighborhood.

Through IAMO4W, we fell in love with events that combine art with community conversation, especially when strangers break bread together. We were already producing plays in living rooms—one-hour, one-person plays on a social justice issue, with a cocktail party and a conversation with a community partner. After IAMO4W, I attended a few other events that paired dinner with conversation: The Chicago Dinners, Civic Dinners, and one about faith hosted by my church. And I liked them, but I kept thinking, what they’re missing is art. 

Theater has the incredible ability to open hearts and minds through stories, and to turn strangers into friends, and we can harness this power by building conversation into our events, not just talk backs with the artists, but deep inquiries into the issues that matter most to our community. And this power grows exponentially stronger when we gather diverse groups of strangers for these conversations and arts experiences. 

In late 2018, I invited the woman who runs The Chicago Dinners to Shaking the Wind, the show I was then producing in homes. She happened to attend a performance at the home of a Decatur activist, and that night, we cooked up the idea for Decatur Dinners, 100 dinners for 1000 guests on the same night in homes, churches, restaurants and community centers, with a facilitated conversation about race and equity over a potluck dinner with diverse strangers at every table, launched by the performance of a very short play about racism in every room, 100 performers speaking the same words at the same time, all over Decatur. 

We were floored by the community support and media attention for Decatur Dinners. The City of Decatur, City Schools of Decatur, and Decatur Housing Authority all came on as partners. We opened up 20 extra tables at the last minute, for a total of 1200 guests, and we still had hundreds of people on the waiting list. Four NPR shows covered the event, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as well as CBS46. The AJC published two separate articles, and most recently, The New York Times featured Atlanta Theater Dinners, the special version we did for the Atlanta theater community. 

In the last year, thanks in large part to Decatur Dinners, we have seen a 110% increase in email subscribers, and an 18% increase in our email open rate, even as our list of subscribers doubled. Our social media followers have increased between 20% on Facebook (our most robust platform) and 60% on Instagram. 25,000 people have watched the Decatur Dinners Documentary online, and bookings for our annual show in homes increased from 30 in 2018 (a record year), to 45 in 2019. Individual giving has skyrocketed as well. We went from almost $29,000 in donations in 2017, to almost $44,000 in 2018, to almost $94,000 in 2019, an increase of over 200% in only 2 years. 

After Decatur Dinners, people started contacting us from across Metro Atlanta, and across the country, asking when the next dinner was, and how they could bring this event to their community. We re-branded Decatur Dinners as Equitable Dinners: Setting the Table for Racial Equity, and we are currently in the process of providing Equitable Dinners for eight other cities. Most excitingly, we are preparing Equitable Dinners: Atlanta, 500 dinners for 5000 guests, in partnership with The National Center for Civil and Human Rights, The King Center, Atlanta Public Schools, and Civic Dinners. Equitable Dinners: Atlanta will feature a re-imagined play addressing Atlanta’s racial history through the work of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition to honor Atlanta’s victims of lynching, in partnership with Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. 

When we began our audience building journey, we had no idea it would lead us here. The goals of getting to know our neighbors better and using theater to ignite community conversations have taken us beyond our wildest dreams.  

As I write this, I am sheltering in place in my home in the MLK Historic District. We don’t know when the world will be ready for 500 in-person conversations, but on April 19, 2020, we launched the first of a series of virtual Equitable Dinners; we’ll be pairing a new community partner and artist each month to launch a conversation on a different aspect of racial equity in the time of coronavirus. We began with health equity, with Dr. Camara Jones, a leading expert on the effects of systemic racism on health, who has spoken about this on CNN, paired with a brand-new short play by Gabrielle Fulton — performed by Danielle Deadwyler. In the coming months, we will explore food equity, education equity, and economic equity, and we will continue to grow this conversation, until the day when we can all break bread in person again.

Information about Equitable Dinners: https://www.outofhandtheater.com/equitable-dinners