Spritivity Summer Camp at
the
National Art Museum of China (NAMOC)
In
July 2007, following the Beijing Primary school level
Spritivity workshops, the National Museum of Art of China
(NAMOC) decided that it would like look at the results
of artistic creativity with a different perspective, by
promoting a Spritivtiy Summer Camp in China, in support
of its initiative to help young people in China to find
their own identities through the kind of ceative and
artisitic practice offered by Spritivity, For NAMOC
"children are our new media". and the wanted to apply
the results of the integtaed creativity that a Sprite
Carnival would create.
The design system of this summer camp was
original from “Spritivity”, an international creative
communication and education programme, which was developed
as joint effort by Zenzone Media Arts Lab of the China
Culture Administration Society (ZML) and the London
Multimedia Lab for Audio-visual Composition and
Communication at the London School of Economics and
Political Science (LML).
The Spritivity Summer camp ran from July
22-28 2007. Ten
students aged from 5-11 participated in the summer
camp. They didn't know
each other before they came to the workshop, but after 7
days working together they became friends and, on the last
day, they exchanged phone numbers and wished to stay in
touch. The children who participated in the summer camp
enjoyed it very much, and NAMOC put out photos and news of
the workshop on its website.
View NAMOC's report on the first day of
its Spritivity Summer Camp
In the last day at the
workshop at NAMOC, the children put together 8 shadow
puppet shows with characters created from different
participants. Most storylines were simple and each show
lasted around 5 to 10 minutes. Some shows had as little as
3 characters, some had 4 or 5 characters. NAMOC posted on
its website photos of these shadow puppet shows.
View NAMOC's report on the last day of
its Spritivity Summer Camp
The NAMOC Spritivity Summer Camp had four
stages guiding children to learn to discover who they were
and develop creative coordination, which would help them to
develop a habit of accumulating knowledge from all things.
The theme of the first
stage was“what do you want to say? How to say? Why to
say?”—Is there any
other way to communicate except through language? Why do we
need artistic creativity
The theme of the second
stage: “What is inside of different styles of art, such as
cartoons, shadow puppet, and painting?” —The creativity of different styles of
art represents children’s opinions of “what they like, what
they hate and the relationships between these two.”
The theme of third
stage was “what’s the purpose of creating characters for
painting, shadow puppet, cartoon?” —All the characterization can be regarded
as “sprite”, which is a process that artists create images,
environments and events.
The theme of the fourth
stage was “Do you want to own your own sprite? Can you
imagine what the imaginary sprite world would be like if
your sprite and others’ live together? ”—You can share your “sprite” with others’
in addition of creating it.
Achievements of the Spritivity Summer
Camp
From the shadow puppet show performances,
we can see that participants worked closely together with
each other and are willing to share the characters with
other participants. They developed simple storylines, but
could let their imagination go free while they performed
the show. In China, this is not common as students are
taught to follow instructions and everything has to go by
the book. Students are required to rehearse before
important performances and every move and storyline needed
to be exactly the same. There is little room for student to
think out of the box and develop creativity.
The Spritivity
Summer Camp gave Chinese students a chance to develop
creativity and imagination which is lacking in the regular
Chinese school system nationwide. In a system driven by
school entrance exams, students are required to fill in
correct answers to each exams in order to succeed. There's
no room for imagination and creativity. In addition, the
society places collectivism over individualism
traditionaly. But under the one child policy, Chinese
children do not have much chance to play with each other,
they go to school to study together, but no chance for them
to play in a group in a relaxed and playful environment.
Students go to many cram schools to learn English, Math or
take music or art lessons, but they are not used to be in a
workshop where they can play with each other in a more
relaxed environment where they are not required to learn
something and go home to show to their parents.
It
is also important for Spritivity to work closely with
Chinese parents, they need to know it is important to give
their children a space to play and set free, From the
results of the Spritivti Summer Camp at NAMOC, we can say
that our workshop was successful and it was an eye opener
to Chinese children and parents.
On its website, commenting on this summer camp, NAMOC
points out: "The tips
for assessment of integrated creative capacity include the
students’ mutual understanding and coordination capacity,
and the problem solving capacity, etc. The assessment
standards system for awareness of artistic creativity is
different from the assessment system for assessing the
skills of art works".