Art therapy & armed conflict: "Tell me a story..."

IT’S NOT ALL GUNS AND KIDNAPPING.

That was what the artists and cultural workers who went to Sulu, Quezon, North and East Samar and Isabela realized when they traveled to these provinces to implement unicef’s arts therapy workshops for public school teachers and pupils in conflict situations.

Rather, it’s about survival, courage, and resilience of spirit, of the public school teachers’ and students’ will to work through and triumph over their situations. And it’s how the arts figure into all of this.

Arts, in a time of conflict?

"Arts and culture can become a sanctuary: a middle ground, a neutral zone," says Tracy Santiago, a theater artist who helped design some of the modules. "It can be a starting point in self-healing."

Unicef has tapped the Cultural Center of the Philippines to implement its country program, recognizing the crucial role of arts and culture in the peace and development process, especially in helping public teachers build their capacities towards normalcy.

Arts therapy is part of the CCP’s Arts for the People program and is composed of two projects: Sining sa Eskwela, a teacher training program, and Batang Sining, a children’s creative expression workshop.

Teacher participants generally find the CCP-Unicef arts therapy to be less intimidating. "Itong arts therapy ninyo, magaang," says one teacher. "Tapos, magagamit mo pa sa pagturo ang matututunan mo."

The modules vary per site, depending on the needs identified during the research phase. The actual conditions of the teachers’ culture and conflict situations provide the context for the design of the modules. But art is key in the processes.

For example, storytelling can be used both for communication and for therapy, as the participants’ feelings, experiences and thoughts can be told and retold. The facilitators also try to use local storytelling forms such as the kata kata of the Tausugs of Jolo, or Gaddang terms in Isabela, which have no English or Tagalog equivalent. Participants find it easier to articulate their thoughts in these forms familiar to them.

Storytelling is also sometimes integrated with other forms, such as the visual arts (drawing, installation art pieces, even sandplay), music (group singing and playing of musical instruments), theater, literature (poetry, journaling), and dance (movement). As the participants experience the process of creation, they learn to let go, and eventually, the activity goes beyond a mind exercise, and becomes more "soulful".

In the end, participants are almost always surprised with their outputs. One teacher in Northern Samar did a Zen-like installation, totally unaware that it was a type of Zen work.

Stories can become instrumental during conflict or crisis situations, as was the case during the Quezon floods of December 2004.

A teacher had to evacuate eight children to higher ground. However, they needed to go through floods, mud and debris. The children were afraid, especially after being separated from their parents and seeing so much destruction all around them.

The teacher gathered the children and made the evacuation as an imaginary Extra Challenge adventure. When they went through floods and the children were scared of the raging water current, she would say, "Ay, imaginin n’yo na chocolate yan, kasi brown yan."

When they saw a dead body lying face down, the teacher would say, "Ay, baka nagpapahinga lang yan. Huwag n’yo siyang pansinin kasi, baka matagalan pa tayo, mahuli lang tayo."

Finally, when the group had to cross a brook with very strong current, one child refused to cross. The teacher kept up the Extra Challenge image and urged the child, "Halika na dali, kasi baka matalo tayo." And the other children rooted for their kasama just like in the game. When they reached the evacuation center, all the children who underwent similar ordeals were visibly traumatized. But the eight who were part of the imaginary Extra Challenge adventure were able to go back to their normal lives more quickly.

The teacher’s use of creativity and imagination to help children go through a terrible experience, as well as its retelling, showed the other teachers that, in the face of conflict, the arts can be a big help.

Even the re-telling of history has became a necessary module in the rediscovery and expression of a proud self-image, as was demonstarted in the Samar workshops. "Actually our province has a story of courage, of survival," says Fray Paolo Diosdado Granado Casurao, a PETA artist-theater trainor, who presented his research on his province so that his kaprobinsyas would look at their culture differently and with a greater amount of pride. "It was empowering," one of the teachers said of the lecture.

Storytelling is only one of the many art forms in our very diverse culture which can be used as therapy to help individuals in conflict situations. Many of us have used art to help liberate us from our angry feelings, our depressions and other emotions when we dance, sing at a videoke, keep diaries, etc. These help us to let go and "process" our experiences.

This is especially necessary for people, particularly children, in armed conflict areas. Many "unprocessed" traumatic experiences can later resurface and manifest as drug addiction, crime and even violence. The arts therapy facilitators and trainors keep this in mind as they listen to all of the experiences: the ordeals, the pains, the depressions, the horrors of war.

But through all that, they see too bright rays of hope, of healing, of lives rebuilt, however slowly. In the end, they realize that it’s not all guns and kidnapping in these conflict areas.

"It’s about our culture, our art...and how we survive even the harshest conditions because of these."