Workshops
Arts Therapy, Imagical Play and Trauma: Exploring Arts Therapy during the Canterbury Earthquakes
Workshop Presentation Deborah Green
The Canterbury earthquakes (New Zealand, 2010- ) and their ongoing aftermath cast many into a situation of enduring liminality. We're threshold communities living amidst ruins and road-cones enduring the highs and lows of the rebuild. As this multi-layered natural disaster unfolded, the creative arts became a refuge, a way to express wordless distress, connect with others, try to make sense and recreate. Creative artists took to the streets, filling vacant lots post-demolition with dance floors, gardens, performance-stages; painting brightly-coloured murals on red-stickered buildings; transforming broken shards into glorious mosaics; placing row-upon-row of white chairs to commemorate those the quakes claimed. As my creative contribution, I provided group and individual arts therapy for the quake-affected of all ages. In this lively workshop, we'll contemplate liminality as a fruitful metaphor for disaster and trauma, exploring how this state evokes playfulness and communitas. Using movement, drama and visual arts-making, we'll experiment with how the mindfully-playful arts therapy processes I've named "imagical play" may encourage the healing state of communitas. The intensified relational pleasure of communitas is valuable within post-disaster and trauma recovery as it helps us forge external and internal healing bonds. Through these connections, we may overcome the stress and distress of isolation and learn to endure – and even learn to play amidst – the ruins of disaster-induced chaos and fragmentation until a new order emerges. Finally, we'll ponder how these learnings forged within the heart of disaster may be useful to a wider range of arts-based practitioners.
Creative and Cultural Intelligence: Applying Effective Creative Process and Cultural Competence
Workshop Presentation Amanda Shatzko
The world is changing at a rapid rate as technology advances how we communicate and work locally and globally. Now more than ever it is essential to master the skills of the creative process, and gain cultural competence. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2020 the top skills humanity and jobs will require creativity, problem-solving, and the ability to collaborate with others. Participants will learn the steps of the creative process, a framework of cultural competence, and how the two structures relate. Participants of this workshop will work in small guided groups to explore how to use flexibility to cross diverse ideas and overcome creative and mental blocks. Within the allotted time, groups will be able to present their observations to the room, to further enhance their experience. All participants will leave with the skills needed to outline the essential steps of the creative process, that will apply to the future of jobs, development, and leadership practices inside and outside the creative economy. They should be able to identify and demonstrate ways to embody cultural competence and explain how the two frameworks relate and have parallel similarities. Valuable hand-out materials outlining the process in detail will be disseminated.
