Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

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.