It is still dark outside. The Creative Works team is up early this morning and we are all very excited. This is the first day of our training with the Butterfly Art Project in Cape Town. After a long drive, we arrive at Capricorn Business Park where we are warmly welcomed by the Butterfly Art team. The room is light and filled with color and art material.
The first day of training starts with the expression pizza, a colorful, creative group activity in which we all get to express our individual beautiful self and reflect on the process together. We talk about the benefits of circle games; we do verses, songs and clapping activities and dive into our own memories of childhood drawing and play with clay during the duration of the training. What fun, what bliss and self-nurturing before we go out and offer these activities to others. The training stretches over four sessions and we get to experience different mediums; oil pastels, water color, clay and multimedia collage.
After each session we implement what we have learnt in our respective communities and the children we work with receive the activities with much joy. The facilitators and the participants are stimulated by the wonderfully rounded and thought through activities that give freedom for self-expression and self-exploration, but also structure needed for the process.
In our work we encounter children that are traumatized and stifled by restrictions that violence and the lack of resources place on them in the environment they live in. Artistic expression can be a conduit to being a creator, to be free, to practice skills in a safe environment, to release fear, trauma and aggression and to work through their feelings constructively and safely, or, to interact with others in a peaceful, gentle way and to see their own inner beauty which they can then take into the outside world and participate fully in their surroundings.
The last day of training is held at the breath-taking Zeitz Mocaa Museum in Cape Town (https://zeitzmocaa.museum) where we all got an opportunity to see the wonderful art installations.
After four weeks of training, we feel well equipped and filled with new ideas that we can make our own.”
Thank you to the Butterfly Art Project. We are excitedly looking forward to the next training.
For more information on Butterfly please visit: https://www.butterflyartproject.org/.
