Around the World

The Power of the Arts

By Indra Adnan, SGI-UK

We live, according to sociologist Anthony Giddens, in "an age of risk." So many of the structures and boundaries human beings depended upon to shape our lives are gone: work, play and family life are going through a revolution of form and meaning--particularly in the Western, developed world.

While it is accepted that technological literacy is a challenge for every government, who takes responsibility for the emotional and spiritual literacy required if individuals are to be able to cope with the freedom--or insecurity--now on offer? Increasingly in the West, educationalists, policymakers and practitioners are looking to the arts to engender such human resources.

In a lecture on the role of the arts in this challenge, as long ago as 1989, Daisaku Ikeda said the following:

"Art is to the spirit what bread is to the body: a necessity without which it cannot renew itself. We may well ask ourselves: Why does art play such an important role in man's growth? The major reason seems to lie in art's 'power of synthesis' and in art's capacity to bring together and unify disparate elements." 

Over four weeks, in a selection of cultural venues in and around London, two long-established SGI-UK cultural bodies, Conflict and Peace Forums (www.conflictandpeace.org) and the Taplow Court Festival (www.sgi-uk.org), came together to explore the 21st-century role of the arts in personal and social development in a variety of formats. Sponsored principally by the U.K. Millennium Fund and Maidenhead and Slough Borough Councils, and in association with Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Prospect magazine and Location One Gallery, New York, the season opened at Tate Modern with a discussion group aimed at developing "a new rhetoric for the arts."

This was chaired by Graham Sheffield, artistic director of the Barbican Arts Centre in dialogue with Prof. Shelly Sacks, head of art at Oxford Brookes University, Prof. Semir Zeki, scientist and author of Inner Visions, and author and singer Pat Kane.


Arts and Creativity

The following three days at Taplow Court took up three central themes. First was: Art and the Mind--what happens when we witness a work of art? Can we identify what prompts or what allows a creative response? Second was: What is Creativity? Is it a universal capacity or the province of the gifted? Can the arts make people creative? And on the final day: The Potential Impact--how could society be transformed by the power of the arts?

Inspiring lectures by Prof. Paul Robertson, creator of the book and TV series Music and the Mind, Patrick Guinand, director of the International Theatre Institute (UNESCO), and Tom Bentley, director of the U.K. think tank Demos, were interspersed with dance and theater workshops by Royston Maldoom and the Chicken Shed Theatre Company.

In addition, each evening saw a live broadcast linkup with Location One in New York where similar discussion groups had been arranged.

On the final day of the forum, young members of the SGI came together with local community schools, choir and dance groups to present ORIAH, a percussion, musical and dance performance representing the culmination of workshops over a six-week period. This also opened the annual Taplow Court Festival of dance, drama and music in which artists give their services for free in order to raise money for the charity War Child.

In the following three weeks, Power of the Arts partnered with the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London to present a series of talks on the idea of "a Play Ethic." Pat Kane held dialogues with prominent sociologists, asking what would be the effect of an artful, creative spirit unleashed in society. What new values would enter into our daily lives--at work, beyond work, in our relationships and families--and how would they shape our experience of what it is to be a 21st-century social being?

Findings from the Power of the Arts season of events can be found at www.conflictandpeace.org.

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