Using Sand Trays Within An Online Arts Based Review of Current Emotional Climate

In this paper, the authors present using sand trays alongside improvised dance, music, art, poetry, and fairytale making to explore the current emotional climate across several countries and cultures during online meetings. This project included creative arts therapy colleagues from New Zealand, China, Switzerland, and the United States. These participants had met together regularly throughout the COVID 19 pandemic among a larger group from more countries to consider their personal experiences using nonverbal expressions to co-create meaningful communication using arts-based interactions on the internet during that global event. The group did not all share a primary common language. In this series of three Zoom meetings, this smaller group addressed the current global emotional climate as the pandemic has lessened. They included sand trays as an expressive form in this series to investigate how this medium could contribute as part of an integrated response within the context of arts-based multi-modality improvisations. The metaphors were reviewed using creative processes of art-based inquiry. Two major themes were identified from the collection of these multimodal expressions. These themes included, 1) the sense of an approaching threat, and 2) the emergence of a long journey of transitions to find hopefulness. The inclusion of sand trays with these episodes of improvisation appeared to open the collaborative metaphors to more collective symbolism.