The Importance of Fine Arts: Visual Arts, Music, Drama/Theatre, Dance

Throughout time, the arts have been essential to the human experience. They are unique tools that allow all people to express feelings and emotions, connect with contemporary and other times and cultures, and develop new insights. The arts enrich the quality of life by linking hope to memory, inspiring courage, enriching celebrations, adding beauty to life, and making tragedies bearable. All students deserve access to the arts through creation, production and performance, and study.

Young children respond to gestures and movement before they react to the spoken word. They understand and explore sound before they learn to speak. They draw pictures before they form letters. They dance and act out stories before they learn to read.

The fine arts – visual arts, music, drama, and dance – are fundamental ways of knowing and thinking. They contribute to a child’s development and foster the skills of communication, creativity, and cognition. Education in the arts benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication.

Dance, drama, music, and the visual arts cultivate the direct experience of the senses; they trust the un-mediated flash of insight as a legitimate source of knowledge. Their goal is to connect person and experience directly, to build the bridge between verbal and nonverbal, between the strictly logical and the emotional. Both approaches are powerful and both are necessary to allow the learner to better gain an understanding of the whole.

The arts connect people across time and cultures. Because the arts are both universal and culturally specific, they are a powerful means of increasing international and inter-cultural awareness. Through the study of the arts, students gain a greater understanding of their own culture as well as preparation for global citizenship. The arts enable students to frame the world from an aesthetic perspective, allowing them to see that there are many ways in which the world can be viewed.

Let us take art at the heart of communities. Through arts let us enrich the lives of our fellow-Filipinos.

Let art inspire and transform people, transform communities. Use it to build a better society.

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By the third quarter of 2008, Magna Kultura Foundation will embark on the task of setting up People's Art Councils in cities and municipalities in the Philippines. By design, the councils will be managed by the people in their locale and will develop and produce programs and activities for citizens in the their communities.