The role of Arts and Drama in our lives

Jan 13, 2021 Leader Leading Culture 0

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Arts have a duo role: they entertain as they teach, and they teach as they entertain. Teaching is the obvious of the two roles, while entertaining is the not-so-obvious, particularly when we go deeper into the matter and ask how and why this is the case. How can, for instance, a funeral song entertain, when its primary role is to express grief?

The answer to this question is implied in the question itself: a funeral primarily expresses grief, but this is not all it does. It also comforts the bereaved by giving them an opportunity to find closure to their loss as they pour out their grief. And some funeral songs imagine an afterlife for the deceased by representing his or her parting as a temporary departure, for sooner or later the mourners will join him or her in the new world that he or she has gone to. There are other roles that a funeral song plays, but let these two suffice for now.

Art tells a story, someone’s story, from which there is usually something to learn. When we listen to a song, watch a film or see someone dancing, a story is being told. A story in which someone’s life is being dramatised for us to see and to enjoy and to pick a lesson or two from. It could be a happy story in which someone is counting their blessings, or a sad one in which someone is lamenting.

In the first category is a song like Sasha Brighton’s “I am so Lucky”, in which she expresses her gratitude to her lover for being a wonderful man. In the second category is a poem like Okot p’Bitek’s “Song of Lawino” in which the main character, Lawino, bitterly laments, because her husband, Lawino, who is Western-educated, rejects her for being old-fashioned, upon getting a fellow-educated woman called Clementine, whom he now loves.

For us to benefit from art, we need to learn how to listen and how to look carefully. At first sight, some songs might sound as mere noise, but the more we listen to them the more we discover the order in what at first hearing struck us as disorder, or rhythm in what at first sounded mere cacophony.
Likewise, we need to learn how to look carefully – at the person on stage and what he or she is doing with his or her body, for instance at the dancer and the different strokes he or she is pulling off. And we need to learn how to feel, for the storyteller is telling his or her story in a particular way that elicits our emotions.

As we do all these, art is teaching us important skills, for instance critical analysis, and the ability to empathise. These are skills that we cannot take for granted in our present-day societies where the art of being human and humane is fast-disappearing.

By Dr Danson Kahyana

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