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

Article Information

Creative Arts Educ Ther (2022) 8(1):3–17 DOI: 10.15212/CAET/2022/8/15

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

Abstract

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.

Keywords: creative movement, intercultural dialogue, art-based inquiry, emotional experience, body language

摘要

当前, 新冠疫情在不同程度上改变了人们的生活, 随着这一重大公共事件的影响力不断扩大, 人们的情感体验也日益多样化。本文通过在中国、意大利两个不同国家开展的创意舞动项目探讨了新冠疫情是如何影响人们的情绪, 并通过艺术本位研究(art-based inquiry)的质性研究方法着重探讨了舞蹈艺术这一独特媒介在跨文化语境中的教育价值。本研究重视艺术与人文学科本身的特性, 将艺术这一重要的表现手法作为链接情感体验和个性化表达的重要媒介, 即通过创意舞动引导参与者反思自己在疫情下的情感变化过程, 并使用舞蹈, 诗歌和图画记录他们的反思。通过分析舞蹈身体语言和参与者的反馈, 本研究发现：疫情给人们的诸多情感体验和个人经历能够用舞蹈的形式进行表达, 通过分析舞蹈语言可以进一步了解这一隐喻性的过程, 使人们的情感体验具象化、形象化。尽管在不同文化语境中, 人们对于疫情的看法不同, 东西方对于疫情的情感体验也有着较大的差异, 而本研究参与者的情感变化过程具有一定的相似性, 即从压抑和斗争的情绪扩展为一种释放与包容。

关键词： 创意舞动, 跨文化对话, 艺术本位研究, 情感体验, 身体语言