I S F F EB R UARY 2021 N E WS L E T T E R
THE LANGUAGE OF CREATIVITY CL AIRE ANGELETTI, LEARNING LEAD CREATIVITY & INNOVATION
T
he Arts can delight, entertain, instruct, provoke and transform, challenging our view of ourselves and the world.
WHY EXPERIENCE THE ARTS? Engaging in the Arts can lead us to explore our inner world and inquire into how we choose to interact with the world around us. We are open to encountering different ways of seeing and experiencing and we are given the tools to articulate those experiences. The process of creating involves us in selecting the interface between ourselves and others, discovering different ways of developing and communicating our thoughts and ideas in a variety of mediums. This process also encourages us to think ‘outside the box’!
As creators and doers, engaging in the Arts encourages students to be critical thinkers and look at the world from different perspectives. Artists seek to develop empathy, sensitivity and an awareness of how to communicate through their chosen medium. One of our greatest living Theatre Directors – Peter Brook, commented: “There is only one story: What is a human being? How does he live his life? Different people approach this theme in different ways. It is always the same question.”
As creators, directors, designers and performers we are exploring and practicing transferable skills such as the ability to work within a team and the ability to motivate and inspire others - developing compassionate Leadership Skills. We are practising and understanding the art of ‘Presence’ and how to work with/or for an audience.
Theatre is a powerful language of signs, symbols, sounds, movement, projections, text, song, silence, image, colour, shape, light, texture, beat and rhythm and the theatre experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries have seen endless permutations of this language in order to express something of what it is to be a human being!
The celebrated theatre practitioner, Stella Adler, talked about the fact that the ancient Greeks regarded the theatre as ‘The Seeing Place’ - a place where people would come to understand the truth about life! In this way as creators we are encouraged to tap into our potential as enquirers, building our curiosity and capacity for deep reflection. Such a process, involving the creation of characters and story, also encourages an understanding of how to promote the well-being of Self and Others through the practise of compassionate empathy.
What makes this language powerful in an educational context is that we can move beyond ideas into the world of experience and experiencing. When the stories told are witnessed by an audience that is when the alchemy of theatre is at work. At its best it means that we leave the theatrical experience changed.
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