ABSTRACT
One of the debates within the arts therapies has been concerned with whether the art forms and processes should be divided into separate services and professions with distinct identities and ways of working, or whether there should be one discipline which makes use of a variety of art forms and processes. There is a long tradition within different cultures of forms that combine the arts. Massey and Massey say that ‘Bharata, the father of Indian aesthetics, saw all artistic forms as expressions of the same creative urge’ (Massey and Massey, 1987:115), pointing out that in Bharata’s writing drama, music and dance were employed together as a matter of course. In early Hindu plays music, poetry, dance and costume ‘were equal members of the same body’. They point out how ingrained in culture this is, linking it to the wide appeal of Indian film. Others have pointed to the fact that children do not naturally differentiate between expressive forms and that, especially in arts therapies work with children as clients, such division does not suit the expressive language of the child. We can see this reflected in writing such as Matthews’s study of children’s early representation and the ways children construct meaning:
the forming and transforming nature of art materials has great facilities for representing…events, but the child employs many other materials and activities to consolidate these understandings. Emerging conceptual understandings are ‘transported’…from one medium to another. From enacting, for example, the motion of cars, aeroplanes and people… running in circles in the playground, synchronising these movements with agonistic facial expressions and noisy vocalisations, the child may go on to enact these trajectories in drawing and so map them into 2D.
