" CREATIVE PARTERNSHIPS FOR INTERVENTIVE COMMUNITIES"
Authors: Lucilia Valente,* Paula Proença,** Alexandra Espiridião,*** Cristina
Chafirovitch,**** Rita Wengorovius,***** Celeste Alhinho;****** Isabel
Bezelga,*******
We would like to present ourselves as a team trainers in the area o art education who
use the integration of the arts and creativity as our working tool. Theatre is dominating
creative area of our work but some of us develop further, visual arts education. Some
of the members of this team were trained in Education through Art, a training course
we attended about 25 years ago at the National Conservatoire at Lisbon. This course
was very innovative in the portuguese panorama of creative arts training . It was at the
pedagogic research centre at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, with the support of the
late Dra Madalena Azeredo Perdigão, that during the sixties a team directed by the
pedopsychiatrist Arquimedes Silva Santos launched the foundations of this course .
Inspired in Herbert Read book Education through Art, this pilot training experience
created a particular angle of practicing the arts, which Arquimedes Silva Santos named
“globalisation of artistic expression ", where along with art expression, dramatic
expression, music expression and creative movement played a very important role. The
theoric basis for that approach was the psychopedagogy of the creative expression built
by Arquimedes da Silva Santos (see Santos, 1977; 1989; 1999). The foundation of
Arquimedes S. Santos is based in a triangulation of pedagogy, psychology and arte
(Valente, Lourenço and Charréu, 1998). He states clearly the pedagogic focus of his
approach where the artistic expression is the methodology by excellence to attain the
wistful integral aesthetic education, an idea already proclaimed in the XIII century by
Schiller (1993) and taken back by Huizinga (1949) in the XX century, all of them
inspired in the Greeks.
The aim of this paper our is to present and discuss creative parternship , through a
practical intervention inspired in globalisation of artistic expression as defined by
Arquimedes da Silva Santos, and the perspectives of applied creativity entwutened with
the perspectives of creativity and theatre theories.
The underlying hypothesis in our approach is that the kind o work allows a transforming
journey through creative expression. This approach is centred on self-understanding
and others understanding where lies, together with creativity a therapeutic trend of this
work..
In our practice as artistic educators we consider that Education through Art is a path for
both self-learning and learning together, through group creative interaction (Valente,
1999; Valente, Peixoto, Craveiro Lopes, 2003).
This education in our view is a way of building creative capacities for the 21 st
century, an education based also on understanding, empathy, identification, projection,
need of openness, sympathy and generosity, required for the education of the future
which Morin proposed to the 21 st century.. We claim that artistic expression can be
used in the training of future educators and we devised creative techniques techniques
which are interdisciplinary and interactive. This expressive training is connected both
with personal and social development. Elsewhere (Valente, 2000) we justify why our
approach to expressive arts has an holistic perspective.
As an example of our approach we will describe one training experience in which it
was used an integration of all the arts, which we named it the globalisation of the artistic
expression. There was a progression of explorative activities in the first moment , to a
second moment focused in creation and the third on application. As the images show
various creative inductors were used ( movement, paper work, painting ,poetry and so
on) . There was a recognition the purpose of the experience. The group shared the
importance of creativity as essential element in human relationships.
The results of the creative work emerging from the experience were very inspiring
and interesting as the images show. The statements collected from the students reflect
the richness of the activity.
In conclusion, for the past years we have been building a repertory of creative
techniques inspired on our work in expressive education and integrated arts (Valente &
Melo, 1997; Cruz, Valente, Charreu, 1998; Valente, Macedo Cruz, 1998), in
dramatherapy (Valente, 1991; Valente, 1993; Valente & Fontana, 1997) and more
recently holistic perspective. By expressive education we mean the globalisation of
music, movement, drama and arts used towards the global development of the person.
At present we are intervening in teacher training programmes using an integrative
approach to arts which values creation and aesthetic experience.
The perspective of personal and social transformation thought expressive arts is a
challenge which involves new practices and new training techniques. In our case it
implies an interactive and communicational work both for trainers and trainees. Our
experience is giving us evidences of the importance of performative presentations. In
the paper we set out to claim that the education of future is a slow path for social
transformation through creative partnerships with involvement and communicational
purpose. This approach ca be used with groups without previous artistic training
Through creative energy we hope to help building more interventive communities and
this is a useful way to build new capacities needed in the 21 century.
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*Ph.D. in Dramatherapy, C.Psychol., Creative Arts
Educator, Professor at the Arts Department, Theatre Section of the
University de Évora,