Creative Dialogues across Countries and Culture during COVID-19

Abstract

This article reports on an online collaboration among creative arts therapists (CATs) from the West and East during the emerging worldwide health crisis related to coronavirus. Four women were from China and were in a restrictive quarantine as the crisis was emerging in that country. Three CATs were from Guam, a Pacific island territory of the United States. The other CAT was from New York City. This group met once across several time zones in a ZOOM room. The goal was to develop arts-based communication about their personal subjective experience of the health crisis. Most of the members of the group were new to each other, each other’s languages and culture, and to using the Internet as an avenue for spontaneous expressive communication. The overall purpose of the meeting was to reach out to each other during this unusual and tragic time to develop collaborative metaphor making as a way to understand each other’s experiences. The group used improvised dance, art, poetry, and fairy tale making. The resulting metaphors suggested a complex combination of the feelings related to both the destructiveness of the health crisis as well as the positive feeling of creative connections among those from different countries and cultures in this dramatic time.

Keywords

• creative arts therapy
• dance therapy
• cross-cultural understanding
• response to the health crisis
• coronavirus
• covid-19
• drama therapy