Expressive Arts is the use of the five art disciplines dance, drama, music, visual arts, and poetry to help individuals explore themselves through spontaneous discovery and enables people to understand themselves, their emotions through art by moving into the creative process. It uses the arts as its basis for discovery and change.
Expressive Arts rests on the premise that imagination is the healer, that encourages the soul to speak in its own way, transforms darkness into light, the hidden and concealed into the open and thus provides insight and release.
Each artistic discipline draws on the special strengths to bridge the gap between the here and now and the world of imagination.
The process is based on the premise of “low skill – high sensitivity”. Simple low skill art making in these different areas help open the senses and access our imagination so we can find our own resources that we hold within ourselves and that our art brings to us.
The process of creativity is about ways in which individuals reach beyond themselves in their conventional lives and involves the mind and body in unison toward new perceptual awareness, and possible transformative states of consciousness. In this sense, creativity “blends the two worlds of mind and matter…the rational with the irrational for the purpose of “forming and reforming the world”.
