Physical Conversations between the East and West: An Arts Based Inquiry into the Cross-Cultural Emotional Climate during a Time of Political Tensions

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is changing people’s lives in varying degrees. People’s emotional experiences are increasingly diverse, as the impact of this major public event continues to expand. This paper explores how COVID-19 affects people’s emotions through an analysis of creative movement projects in China and Italy and focuses on the educational value of dance. It takes a cross-cultural perspective using the qualitative research method of art-based inquiry. This study attaches importance to the characteristics of the arts and humanities and takes dance as an important medium to link emotional experience and personalized expression. Dance, poetry, and pictures are used to record participants’ reflections on their emotional changes during the epidemic. Through the analysis of dance body language and participants’ feedback, this study found that people’s emotional experience caused by the epidemic can be expressed through dance. After analyzing dance language, we can further interpret this metaphorical process and make people’s emotional experience concrete and apparent. Participants were drawn from different cultures; thus, they have different perceptions of the pandemic. Although the emotional experiences from Eastern and Western perspectives vary, the changing emotions of the participants in this study shared certain similarities, that is, from a mood of repression and struggle to a mood of release and tolerance.

Section: The Paintingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Art, Medium and Metaphor—A China–Italy Intercultural Dialogue: Creative Movement in the Context of COVID-19

Mei

Xie

Huang

et al. 2022

“…© 2020 Inspirees International. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License Harvey, Zhou, Kelly, and Wittig (2018) reported on a project in which participants from China and the United States met in person to create collaborative metaphors related to their subjective experiences of "what it feels like to live in the world today." In this project, participants from the East and West used "physical conversations" based on dance improvisations followed by spontaneous art and poetry responses to co-create metaphors with each about their emotional experience of the contemporary world in a time of political tensions between their countries.…”

Section: Other Projects That Develop Metaphors Over Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Creative Dialogues across Countries and Culture during COVID-19

Harvey

Wang²,

Kelly

et al. 2020

Self Cite

This article reports on an online collaboration among creative arts therapists (CATs) from the West and East during the emerging worldwide health crisis related to coronavirus. Four women were from China and were in a restrictive quarantine as the crisis was emerging in that country. Three CATs were from Guam, a Pacific island territory of the United States. The other CAT was from New York City. This group met once across several time zones in a ZOOM room. The goal was to develop arts-based communication about their personal subjective experience of the health crisis. Most of the members of the group were new to each other, each other's languages and culture, and to using the Internet as an avenue for spontaneous expressive communication. The overall purpose of the meeting was to reach out to each other during this unusual and tragic time to develop collaborative metaphor making as a way to understand each other's experiences. The group used improvised dance, art, poetry, and fairy tale making. The resulting metaphors suggested a complex combination of the feelings related to both the destructiveness of the health crisis as well as the positive feeling of creative connections among those from different countries and cultures in this dramatic time.

“…It could be an ideal to promote and develop a "cultural ecology-the healthy interdependence of all people within society" (Chen'sinterview with Hailing, 2018, page 19), but it could also be the underlying motive of all our enterprises, especially when the challenges are so high. 3 The community we have started to create needs to have a common objective, something that comes from bottom up, from our daily experience, how we feel to live in the world we live (Harvey, Zhou, Kelly, & Wittig, 2018), not to reach a symbiotic merge of our ideas and experiences, but to enlarge our vision and to connect within a more vast field, not limited by the (often unnatural) borders maps offer us.…”

Section: Mimma Della Cagnolettamentioning

confidence: 99%

CONFERENCE REVIEW: British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT) and American Art Therapy Association (AATA) Art Therapy Practice and Research Conference, London, UK, 2019

Kalmanowitz

Kaimal

Cagnoletta³

et al. 2019