Trip to the Casa do Pontal Museum
The first trip of 2009 with the children from the Project was to the Museum, last week, on february 13th.
http://www.popular.art.br/museucasadopontal/htdocs/site.asp?lng=2
The day was rainy and we didn’t have much time get to a building that holds a permanent exhibition of Brazilian popular art. Because of the delay and the bad weather (Well .. at least for the parameters of the “cariocas” - the name given to residents of Rio de Janeiro), we stopped and almost turned back in the middle of the journey. But, we didn’t and when we arrived they were waiting for us. Our visit was wonderful!
The museum was shown to us by two ‘educators’ who sang, talked, and did drama, dressed in clothing typical of Brazilian folklore.
The children participated in the drama and Lavigne and Juan were invited to present puppet theatre. The presentations during this interpreted that Lavigne’s doll should accept a stolen kiss from Juan’s doll, but she vehemently refused! Kiss Juan? Never! Not in the theatre!
After lunch we returned home and the children sang happily for all the way back.
A day after the trip to the Museum, we talked a lot about all the things that we saw and the children explored the idea of what is ‘popular’ art, ‘massive’ art and ’scholarly’ art, but they could not understand well this last one … I can imagine why.
The discussion about the importance of going to the museum to acquiure culture was very important as well. Some children in this discussion said: “I prefer to go to museum than shopping, because at the shopping we do not earn anything, we paid. At the museum we earn because we learn.” Is this not beautiful?