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".