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Thandile Mlawu with students at Constitution Hill

I can hardly believe its mid-year already and all the learners are on holiday. This year has been a busy one for TAEP and many new and encouraging developments have come our way. We are growing from strength to strength and are aiming higher every time. So much has happened but I will pull out some of the highlights and share them with you.

In May we facilitated a clay workshop with The Ridge School and Sibonile School and it proved to be a successful venture. The children from the two schools had been pen pals for quite some time and this was the first time they were meeting. When planning for the workshop we had to consider the fact that most of the kids from Sibonile School were visually impaired, so we decided to centre the workshop on clay modelling. The children explored their partners face and moulded the clay in the shape of their pal’s face. The day ended with everyone in high spirits and the exercise left everyone involved feeling energised and inspired, especially the TAEP facilitators.

Nkateko Manganye one of the facilitators of our programme, hosted a workshop at Khomanani Primary School in Diepkloof for two days. He focused on basic art skills training and instilling confidence in young artists. The workshop had an amazing turn out with over 40 children attending on both days of the workshop. We hope to have more of these workshops but materials are often lacking and the cost is too great for our tiny organisation.

We have been fortunate this year with two new spaces to teach from. At the beginning of the year we acquired a space at Constitution Hill and now we have been granted permission to use a large space at the Gallo studios in downtown. We are astonished and pleased by the generosity of the people who have helped our dream become a reality. I would like to thank Solly Sethlako from Constitution Hill and André Gilbertson from Gallo, we appreciate the lengths you have gone to for our organisation.

We have an exciting event coming up on the 28th of July. We will be facilitating an event at Roedean Girls School for their annual community service day. Roedean runs a school programme where they adopt a number of shelters in and around Johannesburg. Last year they decided to host an event for the children from these shelters so they can enjoy a fun-filled day where they can forget all their problems and just be young and playful. TAEP will be bringing the children entertainment in the form of a play specially developed for this event. Each of our eight facilitators will be holding a session of 45min to an hour. The different sessions will include oral poetry, drumming (African drum), music (singing), hip hop dance, charcoal drawing, bookbinding, screen-print on t-shirts and drama. We are looking forward to this event and we would like to thank Heather Barclay and Lené Lordan for approaching us and putting their faith in us. Please do come and join us on the day, it promises to be a joyous occasion.

Our TAEP facilitators have also been hard at work outside the classroom pushing their careers as artists at large. Ricky has recently left for the Grahamstown Arts Festival, he has been rehearsing for this play for months now and we wish him good luck. Mzi has also been busy rehearsing for a play and his show was on at the Civic Theatre. Thandile had the honour of being invited to be an MC at the Unite Against Hunger campaign sponsored by Tastic rice, he performed a few songs there and the crowd responded positively. The TAEP coordinator Solomon Mabengeza left for New York on Tuesday, he will be gone for two weeks and he is going to be missed by the team. In an email he sent me this morning he told us to continue working hard and in true Solomon style signed off saying Viva TAEP.

We are looking forward to the next six months of the year and we plan on using them to further the cause of the TAEP, which is to educate through the arts.

Viva TAEP.

Keywords: Arts-and-Culture, Community, Constitution-Hill, diepkloof-zone-1-library, gallo, Outreach-TAEP, TAEP