Arts For Peace involves carefully facilitated arts-based activities, such as theatre, dance, painting, yoga, and music to foster positive behavioural change. As with sport, art is used as an entry point for peace building. The purpose of Arts For Peace is not art itself, but rather the means through which to convey conflict transformation objectives.
Why Arts For Peace?
So what is it about arts that can make it an effective entry point and vehicle for peace building?
Arts allow you to target children and youth: art is creative and flexible, making it an excellent tool for younger target groups. Art can act as a positive distraction for children suffering either directly or indirectly from conflicts in their communities. Arts For Peace allows children and youth a temporary escape from destructive conflict and simultaneously provides them with an outlet for their emotions, opinions, and hopes for the future. In many cases, arts also result in tangible products that grant parents, or guardians insight into a child’s feelings. Moreover, arts encourage children and youth to think, problem solve, use symbols, and record thoughts, ideas and feelings in innovative ways.
Arts offer a voice to the disempowered:
Art forms such as drawing and sculpting grant individuals a canvas upon which to express emotions that they are unable to express with words. Thus, those who are reluctant to verbalise their thoughts and fears can do so through art. Art can act as a non-verbal language that is accessible to all regardless of gender, social standing, political affiliation or religion. For example, individuals who have suppressed traumatic experiences may feel safer expressing their emotions with paint. Also, dance and theatre allow individuals to use their physical bodies to communicate.
Arts offer an individual experience:
Art forms allow for self-expression. Whether one sketches to find clarity after an episode of violence, or writes in a journal to explore repressed feelings, art can be a very personal and private experience.
Art For Peace Activity
Art For Peace activities provide youth with a creative outlet to express their emotions and opinions
Arts offer a collective experience: Because art is an unspoken language, it can be used as a tool for communication between conflicting parties in a way that dialogue might not be. For example, through theatre, the observer may see the pain in the actor’s movements, or may be able to relate to the symbolism communicated through the script. Theatre can also be interactive where the audience is involved in shaping how the play actually unfolds.
Arts offer tangible messages of change:
Art allows for the creation of tangible products, such as drawings, photographs, and performances, that can be shared with the wider community. Emotions that cannot be expressed in words may be expressed through a painting, poem, or sculpture displayed for others. On a larger scale, theatre, spoken word, rap, documentary filmmaking, public murals, and other forms of Arts For Peace that are created specifically for, and sometimes with, audiences, invite, for example, community members to face the conflict being addressed by the volunteers or youth taking part in GFP programme.
Arts are cost-effective:
arts can support significant positive sustainable change in a community, at relatively low cost. Rather than requiring specific tools, arts can be done using the resources available. The only resource necessary for art is an imagination.