The Power of Limits 3: The Lotus Arts Village

Stephen Nachmanovitch, in his book Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts, includes a chapter titled 'The Power of Limits.'  This is the third in a series of posts inspired by this chapter, exploring how limits not only enhance creative problem solving but are actually a requirement of such a process.  

I've raved before about where I live and how the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival is one of the best things, out of many best things, about our amazing city of Bloomington, IN.   Here's what I found on their blog today, which speaks to this theme of working within one's limits:

Every year, as we devise projects for the Lotus Arts Village, one of our biggest challenges is simply wading through the flood of ideas that evolve into project plans. [...] The urge to “go big” is strong, even though resources are always limited. But the artistic imagination recognizes few boundaries, and the Festival is an opportunity for all of us to dream of new realities … and to stretch ever further to create beauty.

You can read the full post here.  And then you will want to come to Bloomington for next year's festival by buying tickets here!

So far I've been finding a lot of arts-based examples of creative problem solving, but my intent is to try to illustrate non-arts based creativity as well.  Any ideas?

Teaching Below the Surface: Harnessing the Power of Tape!

In earlier posts I espoused my enthusiasm for using simple floor tape to manipulate an environment and encourage physical exploration of that environment.  It's a powerful tool for teaching below the surface, something that makes a bigger impact when you don't talk about it because it's just there.  The Reggio Emilia approach says that environment is the third teacher and I have found this to be true in my work.  How I set up a learning environment can have a large impact on the students, and I have pictures to prove it!

In my work with elementary students we have a group dancing time to warm up and learn clogging, a little each day until they have some mastery of basic steps by the end of the week.  The bulk of our class time, however, is spent with partners engaged in creative work.  This effort is done in what I call a 'personal dance space': a scaled down version of the portable square dance platform on which I teach and perform.  Mine is wood, theirs are tape.  Mine is brown, theirs are blue.  Mine is three dimensional, theirs is two dimensional. Mine is 3'x3' and theirs are 2'x2'.  Did I mention I love floor tape?

On the first day we work exclusively as a large group and the tape on the floor in our dance space is a simple three-sided rectangle.  The kids line up with their toes on the tape and face toward the center of the space.  This way everyone can see me and what my feet are doing.  By the second day of our work together I've managed to tape out about 15 pairs of blue dance spaces.  Inevitably, on that day the kids walk into the room and, knowing nothing about what is going to happen in our class later, they go directly to a box and sit down.  I have to redirect them to the large-group perimeter tape but there's something about having a space of one's own, and these boxes just pull them in.

We never talk about the set up of the room, but since we focus quite a bit on transformation and symmetry in this program I try my best to make sure that, if asked, I can draw an accurate line of symmetry down the middle of our dance space.  So, without further ado, here are some drawings done by fourth graders as part of a Thank You letter project their teacher had them complete at the end of the residency.  No one told them what to draw.

I'm obviously very welcoming!  This was drawn from memory, back in her regular classroom. 
Notice the basic symmetry of the space. 

This isn't exactly what the room looks like (not enough squares), but you can draw a perfect line of symmetry from top to bottom of this picture.

One of the other 'below the surface' learning tools in the program is that working with a friend and sharing ideas can lead to amazing results.  Not only are these two girls dancing together (and smiling), they're dancing in a space delineated by blue tape!