Fostering Children's Creativity and Artistic Freedom: The Terezín Relay Project - Terezínská štafeta
Abstract
The Latin quote, "Verba movent, exempla trahunt-words move, examples compel," aptly describes the inspiration that today's students may draw from the artistic endeavours of writer Petr Ginz and poet Hanuš Hachenburg, two teenagers imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto and then murdered in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. During their incarceration, both Petr and Hanuš demonstrated that creativity and artistic freedom can thrive in the worst of circumstances. It is against this backdrop that the Terezín Relay project, launched at the Prague Nature School, has connected hundreds of Czech students and thousands of Czech audience members to music and theatre through the creative works of two contemporaries lost over 80 years ago.
This paper shares teaching and peer processes unique to the ongoing project, which has been part of the Nature School's arts activities for over 10 years (pupils aged 11 to 19), located in Prague, the Czech Republic. Through immersive, complex, and hands-on arts projects utilizing music, visual art, theatre, and technology, the project fosters students' creativity through peer inspiration, interwoven across time and space, as provided by Terezin's young artists. As a result, Nature School pupils have explored their own creative freedoms by creating and recording original music for texts written by Petr Ginz, Hanuš Hachenburg, and other young Terezín poets through composition and songwriting, as well as creating and performing original music theatre scores and plays grounded in actual experiences of young people imprisoned within Terezín.
Inspired by the artistic legacy of children Terezín prisoners, and also the invaluable work of their adult supervisors and educators at Terezín youth homes (Kasperová, 2011), the head of the Nature School, František Tichý, decided in 2009 to organize a year-long school-wide project that would enable the pupils, so to speak, to take over the "Terezín relay baton" from Petr, Hanuš and other young Terezín prisoners. The topic proved to be so motivating and meaningful that even after the end of the original one-year project, other related activities were and still are being continued. Here we shall deal with those outcomes of the Terezín Relay project that are primarily focused on artistic and especially musical activities, and we shall reveal some of their significant methodological and organisational backgrounds.