By Idyllwild Arts Academy
Contributed
Idyllwild Arts Academy’s Art in Society (AIS) program will present its annual symposium via Zoom (https://idyllwildarts.zoom.us/j/95430507766) Friday, March 12, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
This year’s Symposium on Art and Healing offers reflections on the healing power of art that have arisen directly out of student experiences of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The pandemic has made our students more aware than ever that we need creative engagement to bring balance and healing to our lives,” explains AIS coordinator Erica Nashan.
Last March, 300 academy students scattered across the globe, returning to their homes in some three dozen different countries. They completed their lessons for the 2019/20 school year online and then began 2020/21 online.
About half returned to the IAA campus in October, while the other half stayed home. Now, as many as three quarters of the academy student body may be on campus by April.
Throughout this time of isolation, fear and uncertainty, academy students separated from each other by thousands of miles stayed in touch and gave one another solace by sharing their art online. They asked for a symposium that would articulate what they’ve felt about these experiences, and AIS has obliged with a lineup of talented and thoughtful presenters.
The presenters include Violet Duncan (Plains Cree of Kehewin Cree Nation and Taino) and her husband, Tony Duncan (Apache, Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan). They are practitioners of a number of restorative art forms known to many Native American tribes, including the Hoop Dance, in which Tony has recently won his sixth world championship.
Music therapist Sabina Barton and dance-movement therapist Christine Little, mother of a current academy student, will also present. Barton and Little are at the forefront of a growing movement to address through the arts conditions that are traditionally treated with medication.
Erica Nashan points out, “Art therapy is usually associated with visual arts like painting and sculpture, but arts therapy — with an ‘s’ — practitioners like Barton and Little are demonstrating the therapeutic power of other arts disciplines.”
Finally, DTLA Proud will present a creative response to the pandemic’s torpedoing of last spring’s L.A. Pride parade in LA. Downtown LA residents and DTLA Proud members Scottie Jeanette Madden, Dennis Caasi and Andrew Arnold have found a new ally in using the arts to soften the edges of bigotry in Rachel Gartside, one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s lead education practitioners. Gartside, active in combating anti-Muslim prejudice in the U.K., is collaborating with DTLA Proud on new ways to bring pride to marginalized peoples through the arts.
