Theater project for foster children

The theater project for and with foster children and all their parents implemented by Caritas and GGP has been in existence since autum 2020. From the very beginning, we have been able to experience how much the weekly encounters under the guidance of an experienced theater pedagogue do everyone involved good: they broaden horizons, increase curiosity for new things, and are a lot of fun. And they bring the topic of being a foster child into play, not incidentally but a bit casually and thus unexcitedly. The children experience that their special life situation is not unique and have the opportunity to talk about things that concern them. In the first year, theater training in the form of games and warm-up exercises predominated. It was about trying out and getting to know one's own body, one's own playful abilities more closely. The pandemic created a second challenge: to keep the group together even during breaks in the project, to preserve the sense of community that had developed, to keep reaffirming the emotional closeness to each other. We are happy and a little proud of the fact that at the beginning of the second year of the theater, none of the group members even thought about quitting the project. And we have already achieved a lot: There is now a script, the children know their roles in the play - and identify with them to a high degree, also because they were allowed to invent them themselves and develop them a little. Currently, the focus is on rehearsing the play together: we rehearse weekly, practice the song that was developed especially for our play. This already indicates what will characterize our next year together: an ever deeper immersion in the play, an intensive joint text work, the joint play - and thus also the preoccupation with our own life issues, a lot of exchange, a lot of self-efficacy experience. The highlight next year will be the performance of the play in front of a "real audience". This will be a great success for all the children who are able to experience and shape the project. To make all this possible, we need additional funding.