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Using the Expressive Arts for Coaching, Education and Social Change

"Movement is personality and soul made visible." The Expressive Body in Life. Art and Therapy. Daria Halprin

Angola, 26th February 2007 (Lunchtime) I'm standing in front of a list of work-related issues drawn up by the group this morning. Littered amongst things you'd expect like 'need for teamwork', are things you don't expect, like crime and deforestation.

The word 'hunger' catches my eye - and my heart - for the majority of families here live in extreme poverty. This means less than a dollar a day. My mind ricochets back to an email I received this morning about the UK Forum's lunch menu: "Shall we have the £15 menu or the one for £16.75?" I'm having the mother of all culture shocks.

I'll let you into a secret. For quite a while now I've been using the Expressive Arts for learning and change. Oh, I started small, a career client here and there, the occasional group. Now, I'm into the hard stuff - working to effect social change in Angola. Working at the meeting place between the person, the role and their social context.

Five years after the end of a 30-year civil war, peace has many faces. It's about creating a respectful community; political transparency; and about having clean drinking water, electricity, food, and education. Not to mention health care - the mortality rate for the under 5's is 50%.

Invited by Development Workshop, the Canadian NGO, I'm working with 50 Youth Ambassadors for Peace. They come from various religious, political, civil and community groups and their role is to be a peacemaker in their community.

Our goals are to explore the issue of peace and offer creative problem solving tools to manage their differences. It's as much about healing as it is role clarification: making peace with ourselves is the first step within the community; then considering peace in a wider context. And because it's about healing and transformation we've turned to the Expressive Arts as our resource of choice. In the face of destruction, we turn to the creative process for our solution.

The Halprin Life/Art Process is an integrated approach that's based on a particular view of the body and movement. Namely, that the body holds a person's entire life experience and movement is the body's primary language. I'm not talking about the wrinkles and crevices of ageing, but about the body as a container for emotions, memories, feelings, and associations. This bodily wisdom is expressed and explored through movement/dance and the imagination (writing and drawing). We work with movement as metaphor, from an artistic point of view, using the principles of creativity and art making. The creative process becomes a unique problem-solving tool in its own right.

Now, in terms of application in Angola, We have arts-based activities for personal exploration and a participatory dance ritual, called Planetary Dance, for community building. Like the dances of indigenous peoples around the world it's not a theatrical performance but allows people to use dance as a vehicle to express commitment to a shared cause. Here it's peace. It is made up of sections reflecting the change process: honouring individual and group identity; celebrating the power of community; evoking and confronting the destructive forces within; healing and restoration; creating a pathway to peace and, finally, the Earth Run. This last section is often used as a "stand alone" dance (part of Live Earth on 7th July). It's a dance of concentric circles based on running, walking and stillness. Each of the elemental movements represents a commitment to action and involvement: the urgency of running, the dignity of walking and recuperation of stillness. It's a moving mandala.

As career practitioners, when people come to us feeling stuck, heart sick, or searching for meaning in life and career, their creative capacities often seem dulled. The symbolic act of creating a dance, a drawing or a piece of writing affirms the basic life force in us - the impulse to create. These activities touch the emotion, the psyche and the soul and increase a person's creative resources for decision-making. In an increasingly disembodied society, embodied creativity becomes an important problem-solving tool for everyday living rather than a distant childhood memory or hobby.

Joy Packard, Career Coach, Facilitator and Halprin Practitioner. Certified as a Career Management Fellow with the Institute of Career Certification International and an associate teacher at the Tamalpa Institute, a centre for movement-based expressive arts therapy and education. Facilitates career consultation workshops integrating creativity and arts-based coaching.