The Arts

What are the Arts about?

Te toi whakairo, ka ihiihi, ka wehiwehi, ka aweawe te ao katoa.

The arts are powerful forms of expression that recognise, value, and contribute to the unique bicultural and multicultural character of Aotearoa New Zealand, enriching the lives of all New Zealanders.

The arts have their own distinct languages that use both verbal and non-verbal conventions, mediated by selected processes and technologies.

Through movement, sound, and image, the arts transform people’s creative ideas into expressive works that communicate layered meanings.

The arts learning area comprises four disciplines: dance, drama, music – sound arts, and visual arts. Within each, students develop literacies as they build on skills, knowledge, attitudes, and understandings at each of the eight levels of the curriculum. Through arts practices and the use of traditional and new technologies, students’ artistic ideas are generated and refined through cycles of action and reflection.

Visual Arts

Through engaging in the visual arts, students learn how to discern, participate in, and celebrate their own and others’ visual worlds.

Visual arts learning begins with children’s curiosity and delight in their senses and stories and extends to communication of complex ideas and concepts.

An understanding of Māori visual culture is achieved through exploration of Māori contexts.

The arts of European, Pasifika, Asian, and other cultures add significant dimensions to New Zealand visual culture.

The visual arts develop students’ conceptual thinking within a range of practices across drawing, sculpture, design, painting, printmaking, photography, and moving image.

Drama

Drama expresses human experience through a focus on role, action, and tension, played out in time and space.

In drama education, students learn to structure these elements and to use dramatic conventions, techniques, and technologies to create imagined worlds. Through purposeful play, both individual and collaborative, they discover how to link imagination, thoughts, and feelings.

As students work with drama techniques, they learn to use spoken and written language with increasing control and confidence and to communicate effectively using body language, movement, and space.

As they perform, analyse, and respond to different forms of drama and theatre, they gain a deeper appreciation of their rich cultural heritage and language and new power to examine attitudes, behaviours, and values.

By means of the drama that they create and perform, students reflect and enrich the cultural life of their schools, whānau, and communities.

Music

Sound from natural, acoustic, and digital environments is the source material for expressive ideas in music. These ideas are manipulated and extended into forms, genres, and styles that are recognised as music.

Music is a fundamental form of expression, both personal and cultural. Value is placed upon the musical heritages of New Zealand’s diverse cultures, including traditional and contemporary Māori musical arts.

In music education, students work individually and collaboratively to explore the potential of sounds and technologies for creating, interpreting, and representing music ideas. As they think about and explore innovative sound and media, students have rich opportunities to further their own creative potential.

As students learn to communicate musically with increasing sophistication, they lay a foundation for lifelong enjoyment of and participation in music. Some will go on to take courses in musicology, performance, or composition. These may be steps on the way to music-related employment

Dance

Dance is expressive movement that has intent, purpose, and form. In dance education, students integrate thinking, moving, and feeling.

They explore and use dance elements, vocabularies, processes, and technologies to express personal, group, and cultural identities, to convey and interpret artistic ideas, and to strengthen social interaction.

Students develop literacy in dance as they learn about, and develop skills in, performing, choreographing, and responding to a variety of genres from a range of historical and contemporary contexts.