Arts Buffet
A weeky residency that uses the arts to celebrate community
Featuring JCCGCI’s Marlboro Older Adults Center
A weekly arts residency led by Billy Schultz
This residency, made possible with a SU-CASA grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council, was co-facilitated with Abby Chan. This residency, made up of weekly 75 minute arts session with seniors, explored movement, visual arts, and creative writing/language study.
Each session began with a 15-20 minute physical warm up. Qigong, Yoga, and dance were among the physical activities and disciplines we utilized for our warm ups. Once our bodies were warm, we would move into 25 minutes of water color painting. Participants were all given a prompt that would stimulate their imagination, memory, and conversation. Examples include “paint a moment from your childhood”, “a person or place from a dream”, or “a portrait of a loved one”. The painting would then lead us into our language work.
Many of the seniors at the center loved studying English. We took the paintings and then discussed what we saw in Cantonese and English. Each session, members would learn 5-10 new English vocabulary. Emphasis was placed on pronunciation and detailed phonetic work. English speaking participants either helped teach the new vocabulary, or worked on a poem or short story about the center.
Finally, in our last 15 minutes we would do another physical activity, often including imagery from the paintings done earlier in the session.
During the course of the residency, I built relationships with the other instructors at the center. This allowed our final arts-sharing event to feature the work of the photography, music, Zumba, and yoga classes.
Community Arts Sharing (full show)
