Concordia will be a busy hub for Quebec’s creative arts therapists during International Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) week, March 11 - 18.
The week started Saturday with Professor Stephen Snow’s play Through the Eyes of Caregivers: an ethnodrama on mental illness in the family.
Based on the transcriptions of interviews with over twenty caregivers, Snow says the play is a form of research in which the report is a performance of the informants’ lived experiences of being a caregiver.
Audience members participate in before-and-after voluntary feedback sessions, via an anonymous questionnaire and a post-show discussion with the audience.
“It is a new approach to health education for caregivers of loved ones with a mental illness. It was our last show at Concordia before we go on tour,” says Snow.
March 18: a Full day symposium
The week will culminate the following Saturday with a full-day symposium in the EV Building in which all Quebec art therapy organizations will be represented.
“The main goal of this symposium is to come together and focus on four themes: action, research, transformation and solidarity,” says Maria Riccardi, an adjunct professor at Concordia University and vice-president of the Association des art-thérapeutes du Québec.
“On the Symposium day, Creative Art therapists will collaborate and inform the public about the use of the visual, musical and dramatic arts in therapy; it will be a day to create all together with the community and to share our ideas on research.”
The public is welcome to join the symposium and Riccardi hopes that it will help people to better understand the approaches and level of professionalism that characterizes creative arts therapies practice.
More than thirty tables will be set up in the EV atrium, representing a variety of creative arts associations, universities and organisations such as Université de Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Mouvement Santé Mentale Québec and the Grands Ballets Canadiens.
Therapists and researchers from all four creative arts therapies fields – dance, drama, music and art – will deliver talks and performance related events.
The Art Hives Network, for example, will host art-making sessions that will include all participants as artists. Established by Janis Timm-Bottos, associate professor, these “public homeplaces » are a network of more than 100 public community art studios designed to help citizens tap into their creativity and come up with solutions for community issues; 15 art hives will be present at the symposium.
Find out more details about the symposium: please visit the symposium events page.