From the SF Chronicle.
Quote:
Art heals best by having only itself, not healing, as its goal
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Poet Robert Lowell put the question this way: "Is getting well ever an art,/ or art a way to get well?"
Any discussion of the arts and healing involves a certain tension, a sense of uncomfortably crossed purposes. In the purist's view, art is not something to be prescribed or tailored to a purpose, no matter how worthy. It simply exists, radiantly free of any objective other than to be the truest and deepest expression it can be. Anything else corrupts and exploits it.
more... Quote:
Believers with varied theories attest to the healing power of art, the language that speaks to the mind and body for the renewal of life.
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
All roads in the vast healing arts movement lead eventually to choreographer Anna Halprin's Marin County hillside home, studio and legendary dance deck in Kentfield. There, for more than 30 years, Halprin has been working out the dynamic of art's multidimensional power to heal mind and body, which many believe in but few have experienced in such a visceral, immediate way.
In 1972, Halprin drew a self-portrait that envisioned a blurry gray area in her pelvis. Resisting her customary working method of dancing what she'd drawn, Halprin woke up with a queasy feeling in the middle of the night, made a doctor's appointment and discovered that she had a malignant tumor. After chemotherapy, her doctor declared her cured.
more... <small>[ 24 July 2003, 05:04 PM: Message edited by: LMCtech ]</small>