Art, Medium and Metaphor—A China–Italy Intercultural Dialogue: Creative Movement in the Context of COVID-19

Abstract

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is changing people’s lives in varying degrees. People’s emotional experiences are increasingly diverse, as the impact of this major public event continues to expand. This paper explores how COVID-19 affects people’s emotions through an analysis of creative movement projects in China and Italy and focuses on the educational value of dance. It takes a cross-cultural perspective using the qualitative research method of art-based inquiry. This study attaches importance to the characteristics of the arts and humanities and takes dance as an important medium to link emotional experience and personalized expression. Dance, poetry, and pictures are used to record participants’ reflections on their emotional changes during the epidemic. Through the analysis of dance body language and participants’ feedback, this study found that people’s emotional experience caused by the epidemic can be expressed through dance. After analyzing dance language, we can further interpret this metaphorical process and make people’s emotional experience concrete and apparent. Participants were drawn from different cultures; thus, they have different perceptions of the pandemic. Although the emotional experiences from Eastern and Western perspectives vary, the changing emotions of the participants in this study shared certain similarities, that is, from a mood of repression and struggle to a mood of release and tolerance.