The last few weeks have been full of activity leading up to Holy Week at common cathedral and MANNA. Holy Week held many opportunities for the community to engage in creative activities, so there was a lot for me to learn. I spent the majority of my time in the last two weeks working with community members on two special projects, one of which I will discuss in this blog post.  The second will be detailed in my next blog post.

For the first project, I led community members at common art in painting a large backdrop for a community member’s Easter play, which he wrote at MANNA and enacted with help from Amanda Ludeking. This was such a lovely opportunity to collaborate across the programs and to bring art and drama therapy together for the community. Since it was my first time painting pieces for a set, for the sake of time and in order to include more painters, I sketched out  the setting of Jerusalem on large white paper ahead of time. Then community members worked together to paint the scene with newly-returned acrylic paints. I worked with the playwright and community members to pick colors for each section of the painting.