Home>Curriculum>THE ARTS AT NiBS

THE HeART OF HOLISM

As a School with a deeply holistic vision of education focused not just on the head, but equally on the nourishment of the heart and hand too, the Arts programme at NiBS permeates every grain of our lives at NiBS. As part of the programme, we offer learning opportunities in the areas of Visual Art, Clay and Pottery, Indian Dance, Indian Music and Western Music, both vocal and instrumental.

Our purposes and intentions

The broad objectives of our programme are,

  • To help identify the varied and diverse talents of children and encourage their proficient development.
  • To serve as a means of fostering balanced, all-round growth.
  • To help children develop a holistic, rich and integrated world-view. This may be done by augmenting study in the mainstream academic disciplines with the help of relevant and interesting interdisciplinary perspectives. For e.g. a joint teaching class could help to better explain the concept symmetry both in mathematics and in art!
  • To acquaint and expose children to the history of human excellence and genius in diverse fields.

A gradual progression

While children in Junior School are exposed to the entire breadth and range of the programme, Middle school students are encouraged to make specialised choices based on their areas of interest and talent. They choose between Studio Art and Clay as part of the Visual Arts stream and between Western Music, Indian Music and Dance as part of the Performing Arts stream.

Our Visual Arts Department also offers Senior students the choice to pursue Commercial Art as a Senior Secondary subject option.

The annual calendar

At NiBs, the Arts calendar is a vibrant and lively mix of innovative weekly, monthly and annual festivals, performances, assemblies, inter-house and inter-school events.

Srishti – the annual Arts Festival, is one of our most looked forward to initiatives. Hosted over two weeks in December, it both celebrates the unique transformational power of art and pays tribute to the boundless wonder and innate creativity of children.

Transforming our spaces into a carnival of colour and creativity, it uniquely offers children across grades Ankur to XII, a platform to showcase their talents in the areas of music, theatre and movement on stage.

A curated theme-based art exhibition allows them to share their prowess in studio art and pottery, and at  the same time, a week-long series of workshops, lec-dems and performances by artiste atithis exposes  them to fields as diverse as toy and puppetry, the book arts and paper craft, film and photography,  Madhubani painting, mime theatre and more.

As parents, children and teachers come together in a symphony of swara, steps, song and strokes, the preparations and performances of Srishti enable them to birth new and original ways of ‘seeing’, encourage the discovery of new talents and potential, and foster deeper connections both with the self and the community.

Voice of Art – An Inter-school Practice Based Research Challenge

‘Voice of Art’ is a unique change-making initiative conceived of by our  Art Team. Non-competitive in format and embracing a wide variety of visual arts media and forms, the founding motivation behind the challenge is to encourage ‘different ways of seeing’ – ways that enable young adults to go beyond the dominant discourse and approach arguments related to social concerns with greater sensitivity and understanding.

The true change-making nature of the initiative lies in its recognition of the capacity of arts based approaches to evoke emotional reactions and positive change without necessarily needing the finality or definitiveness of a conclusion or ‘solution’. Deciphering more layers or encouraging a new way of seeing in art can simply mean posing a question or provoking a new perspective.

As part of the challenge, students from various schools, use an arts based medium of their choice to research and respond to a chosen theme and then express their emerging insights, ‘solutions’ or questions as artworks. They are guided and mentored in the processes of contemporary art practice and receive feedback from an eminent panel of thought leaders and educators. The challenge ends with a public exhibition of their works sparking a dialogue between the talking student voices and visitors’ responses.