Community Arts for God's Purposes:

How to Create Local Artistry Together

Brian Schrag, Julisa Rowe, Brian Schrag, Julisa Rowe

• Publisher: William Carey Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645081838
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Rituales cristianos y práctica

People communicate by speaking words in over seven thousand languages around the world. They also sing, dance, paint, preach, dramatize, and design communication that enlivens heart, soul, mind, and strength. God gave every community unique gifts of artistic expression to enable its members to proclaim the Truth and to bring healing, hope, and joy to others in the fallen world in which we live. Community Arts for God's Purposes highlights the CLAT (Creating Local Arts Together) method, a seven-step process that inspires artistic creativity and collaboration with local musicians, dancers, storytellers, actors, and visual artists. In this manual, the arts are treated as special kinds of communication systems, connected to specific times, places, and social contexts. As local communities use the creative gifts developed in their particular culture to worship God and extend his kingdom, a beautiful example of the Lord's complex artistry emerges. This book helps communities draw on examples and insights from over two thousand years of church history to understand and improve the present. It motivates people by painting a vivid picture of a better future: the kingdom of Heaven. Contributors also apply expertise from multiple academic disciplines, such as ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology, biblical studies, and missiology. ? Experiment with this manual. Adapt it to your setting. Let it be an aid in creating astounding bits of artistry on earth that you'll recognize in Heaven.

STEP 1

MEET A COMMUNITY AND ITS ARTISTIC GENRES

Step 1 is discovering and describing a community and its arts. When you start to work with a community, observation (research) is very important. You want to find out as much as you can about the community and the community’s arts. Art comes from its context, so knowing about a community will help you understand its art.

What community are you targeting? We define a community this way: a community shares a story of events, characters, and ideas that have occurred in its past. Everyone knows and can refer to the past events, characters, and ideas. These shared experiences give the community members a reason to keep gathering together. A community also shares an identity. Markers of this identity distinguishes the group from other communities. Identity markers may be language, food, dress, religion, or shared struggles. Communities also share interaction patterns. Examples of shared interaction patterns include rituals, festivals, family living quarters, visual and tactile symbols and patterns, and many more.

Communities share a story, an identity, and a way of interacting. But always remember that communities change. They are made up of individuals who come and go, make their own decisions, and respond differently to the many situations they encounter.

As you begin exploring your community, write down all your discoveries in one place. A Community Arts Profile (CAP) will help you do this. A Community Arts Profile (CAP) is a database or document where you keep all the information on the community and its arts (see pp. 51–53).

Take a First Glance at a Community

A quick look at a community will help you understand the context for developing and performing art. Art does not exist alone. Get initial information about the community’s geographical location, language, identity markers, and communication methods.

Decide on the range of your research. Will you study one clan in a village, or everyone in a region who speaks the same language? Describe things from as many viewpoints as possible. The chart below is a question guide. You can get information in other ways, too:

• Ask friends, leaders, and other contacts from the community to show you other resources, including people.

• Read and observe how community members have presented themselves in books, articles, videos, recordings, and other media.

• Read academic research, encyclopedias, and other resources to see what others have said about the community.

Write down a preliminary description of the community you want to work with. Include these topics: where they are; how many they are and what they are like; what story and identity they share; how the community has changed over time.

Figure 5. Studying the Community: Some Questions to Ask

Take a First Glance at a Community’s Arts

We help communities create from artistic resources that they already possess. Using resources already in existence is a core component of our approach. So one of the first things to do is to make a list of existing arts.

Finding and recognizing artistic genres

Every community has a unique catalog of types of arts, and each community puts unique meanings on each type of art. Your categories of arts will probably not match those of any community you work with. So how do you find them? Fortunately, there are some common characteristics of arts around the world that help us in our research.

The first commonality is that cultures often celebrate important events and transitions with artistic communication. Events to look at include life cycle and historical events, activities, ceremonies, and nature. If you can identify rituals and special events that exist in a community, you can find out about the arts that are associated with those events.

The second common feature of arts is that they are special kinds of communication that are more stylized than other kinds of communication. Notice when people move in special patterns (dance), sing, act, paint, speak with rhythms or rhymes, or do something in a special performance setting (like on a stage). These characteristics probably point you to artistic genres. The “Make a Quick List of Artistic Genres” activity uses these unique characteristics of arts to get started.

Figure 6. How to Recognize Artistic Communication Acts

Make a Quick List of Artistic Genres

To make an initial list of artistic genres, gather a few people from a community and ask them questions like this:

• When do people in this community sing? play instruments? dance? tell stories? act? carve? paint? use their bodies in unusual ways? play games? build special structures? Remember that each culture divides up and talks about its forms of artistic communication in unique ways, so learn its vocabulary.

• Do people in this community do anything special surrounding the birth of a child? someone’s death? someone’s passage from childhood to adulthood? For each affirmative answer, ask them to describe what special things happen and make note of the arts involved.

Whenever an artistic genre comes up in discussion, jot down a few of the genre’s basic characteristics:

• Local name and brief description

• People involved (men, women, youth, children, specialists, a particular socioeconomic group, etc.)

• When it’s usually done (events, particular days, seasons, months, times of day, etc.)

• Connotations and associations (celebration, fertility, worship, death, etc.)

• Effects on participants (pride in identity; feelings of solidarity, lust, fear, or courage; motivation to act; remember life-crucial information, etc.)

• Institutions or organizations that are associated with the genre (church, government office, community group, club, etc.)

Don’t worry about getting all the details while you’re making a survey. You can add more information as you keep learning.

Put Basic Facts About Genres into a Chart for Comparison

In Step 3, community members will evaluate each genre for use in reaching kingdom goals. This chart will help them do that. Start it now, then add more information as needed. Figure 7 shows a chart with data from Mono arts (DR Congo).

Figure 7. Sample Mono (DR Congo) Genre Comparison Chart

Start Exploring the Community’s Social and Conceptual Life

Developing a broad understanding of the community is important, and a broad understanding of the community comes through anthropological study. Research topics especially helpful to understanding a community’s arts include these: how people use languages; how they relate to each other in social groups, especially family; how people get what they need to live (for example, food, shelter, health, education); differences in status or power between people; religious beliefs and activities; and worldview. Wide research in these areas is beyond the scope of this manual. Learn to do this kind of research, or find somebody else who can.

Continue Your Research

You will never completely understand all there is to know about a community, so you have to keep learning. Some of the best ways to learn have been developed by anthropologists, and you can learn how to do them. These include learning by watching while doing (participant-observation), by doing (learning an art foreign to you), by asking (interviews), by writing (note-taking), by capturing and viewing audio and video (recording), and by taking photographs. Find somebody to teach you these...