Gifting

Today I composed a song with a group of 4th and 6th graders. Just to even say that I composed a song is a feat considering that I am a dancer and cannot read music, but to have composed a song with a group of 25 children is even more of a feat. One of the other volunteer artists has a degree in music education and discovered a method for composing with children after working with the Metropolitan Opera Guild. He led myself and the other volunteers in a workshop on how to lead the composition class and off we went to teach the students. It was eye-opening to realize that singing really is just speaking with a rhythm to it, and the fun comes in experimenting with diverse rhythms.

The Gifting Tree
Leave a message of positive thought
or a gift to share with the world

When working with the students, we focused the message of the song to the theme of  camp: Imagine Your Possibilities, and Gift Them to the World. To the Western world this may seem to be a straightforward idea, but to the children of Shanti Bhavan (SB) it’s a more complex thought. The students come to SB at the age of four and stay until they go to college, and even then they come back on the weekends. The children come from the poorest areas of southern India and, although the caste system is now illegal in India, their families are of the lowest “untouchable” caste. To be attending SB is an immense honor as their education, housing and food is all paid for, including their college tuition. Each year a new class of about 25 three- to five-year-olds are selected from a pool of around 300 applicants based on various academic and social tests. The students are steered toward becoming businessmen, engineers, doctors, tech specialists and other similar high-paying careers that will allow them to pull their families out of poverty. Thus, while we as artists hope to inspire the students and shed light on their many talents, we have to be careful to not promote a message that will not benefit the students in their long run. Whereas students in the Western world can imagine the possibility of becoming an actress or musician, the students of SB cannot. However, we can help the children discover how to incorporate the arts into their every day lives and illuminate how studying the arts can improve the talents needed for their professional jobs, such as original thinking, collaborative work and discipline.