Secret Garden Art Experience

My Art experience was from a different form of art but was rich in visual art symbolism. I went and saw the musical The Secret Garden at the Hale center theater. It was fantastic! One of the themes in the musical is the symbolism of paintings. Many of the characters are dead and so at times the actors and actresses were literally framed against a wall, showing how the living characters were effected by the haunting portraits. Another really neat thing they did was to implicitly use red handkerchiefs as a symbol of death and sickness.

I know that a lot of high schools go and perform their musicals as a dress rehearsal for the local elementary school. I think that this would be an amazing experience, especially for older students. In this case, I would plan ahead and read Secret Garden as a class so that they have back ground knowledge. With musicals, I think it is important to expose them to the plot and certain themes so that they can look for them. Afterwards it would be good to facilitate a classroom discussion about the different themes in the musical. Because all of our students will becoming from different back grounds and will have different preferences when it comes to the arts, I think that it is important to expose them to all forms of art.