Collective Anxiety and Healing through the Arts

IACAET East-West Dialogue Series

Stabilization - Breakthrough - Resilience through the Arts

IACAET 东西对话系列: 稳定与破局 –艺术康复 艺术·身心·生命系列（第六季）

As the world continues to adapt and live with Covid-19, we are entering a post pandemic age. Challenges continue to emerge ever clearer – global conflict/war, inflation, climate change, food and water shortages threaten the entire human race. Each of us must deal with ever increasing uncertainties, instability and changes every moment of every day.

Now more than ever, we need novel and creative ideas and actions to assist us in finding balance and stability. Similar to the Chinese symbols of duality, yin and yang, finding a balance between 'structure of stability' while also longing for 'breakthrough and freedom' become a delicate possibility. In this series, we will explore and foster a 'dialogue in action' between Eastern & Western thought regarding how we can use the arts to create new symbols and dance and transform creatively between the dualities, to stabilize ourselves and find a pathway for breakthrough in these challenging times.

This series is presented by the IACAET China Regional Chapter. Our Chinese colleagues will curate and host the sessions in dialogue with our international speakers. These dialogues will search for common ground between East-West in dealing with our current global challenges, reflecting on how we can be empowered by the arts to heighten our social responsibility as professional educators, therapists, researchers and leaders in related fields.

Part two: Collective Anxiety and Healing through the Arts

Time: 7-8:30am New York / 8-9:30pm Beijing, November 13, 2022

While the term collective anxiety isn't something new, it is, somehow feeling different to its usual connotations. It has become more of a collection of various senses and perceptions of an experience of stressfulness that seem to permeate through social threads of communities. How do we construct environments that heal this kind of complex stress?

In this 1.5 hr. interactive seminar, Dr. Zarate will highlight topics of collective anxiety that are linked to global health concerns, such as access to healthcare, poverty cycles, and global warming eco-anxiety. Living through a global pandemic has shifted focus on how certain mechanisms such as the Arts can support safer, sustainable and vibrant environments. In order to develop these generative experiences, it is important to learn from each other regarding how to harness these powerful tools to operate them effectively in wider, larger social and cultural landscapes. It begins with community action, and applying the Arts that we know which lead towards change in our minds, our bodies, and our hearts. It requires interplay with human and non-human life that looks towards sustainable health and mental health practices in and across community and cultural borderlands. It requires looking at the opposites and finding the intersections. Finding a way through the static of anxiety can be daunting and feel impossible. But, when we look at the broader landscape and begin to understand the contexts of things that operate around us, it helps to understand how those cause a ripple effect in our collective consciousness and experience. When we combine our collective knowledge of the Arts as an anti-stress movement, we can move towards healing and shared sustained, positive and productive collective affect.

This webinar will be curated by and in dialogue with our Chinese colleagues and consists of lecture, discussion and Q&A.

There is English-Chinese translation for this webinar which will be recorded and accessed by all IACAET members.