„To experience that you have a creative idea is independence, autonomy in itself.”

Kristóf Horváth is the head of the art programme of our Expect_ART project. He was interviewed by Ádám Bethlenfalvy about his working method, discussing nonviolent communication and social lies.

What are your main goals when working with children?
The work has three pillars: experience, co-creation and mental hygiene. Let’s go backwards. It’s difficult to separate which is the goal and which are the means. My general goal is mental hygiene, but it is more specific to say that they should have as rich a vocabulary as possible to describe their emotions and to have the tools, vocabulary and mindset to know themselves. This is important because it will then improve their social relations, their attitude to mistakes, but also because the aim is not to lie to ourselves. Art is a tool for these things, and art is an experience. So what I do is offer children the opportunity to connect with the compulsory curriculum in an experiential way. One of my main aims is to increase vocabulary, especially in expressing emotions, and concerning actions so they also reflect on themselves and their self-awareness grows and strengthens.
Does the fact that you use art as a tool mean that the goal is not necessarily to create something?
No, I see it as a tool. To experience that you have a creative idea is independence, autonomy in itself. It’s our birthright to try to shape our environment to our liking, and an artistic, creative process is a small and playful version of that where there are no right or wrong answers. Everyone can experience that their insight can be uniquely valid. There is collaboration, making mistakes, learning processes, debates, so it’s a good place to develop self-awareness.
I’m wondering, are the artistic tools you use tools or do they provide some kind of framework for learning? There’s a slight difference between the two – the framework allows for an impact on the different senses that the framework of schooling somewhat precludes. It may not make much sense, but taking creation, creative activity, as a framework can actually be useful.
Yes, in general I like to say that we develop through creative processes in relation to mental health. The reason why I don’t like to say that we teach non-violent communication is because non-violent communication is one approach – some people know it naturally, some people take it apart and compartmentalise it, but in the end it all leads to the fact that we can do it. But all the techniques of nonviolent communication, all the tactics of how it’s built, we’ve adopted that.
We’ll come back to the principles of nonviolent communication that you use in your work, but let me just go back a little bit, why do you want to deal with emotions? Why did you mention emotions in the first place?
It’s such a grey area, there is a gap in society in this respect, in self-awareness, in accepting, recognising and embracing our emotions. And somehow if we break down our emotions, our social relationships, into elements, one of the elements of that is recognising other people’s emotions, recognising our own emotions, and becoming aware that our emotions are not changeable, they are not decision-based.
Not decision-based?
We cannot make decisions about our emotions. An emotion is always valid. And then you have to distinguish between an emotion and a thought.
So you separate the feeling from the thought. I understand that feeling is always valid, it cannot be questioned, but feelings can be generated. In fact, art it seéf works on the emotions and the senses. So how you say a sentence affects my emotions and somehow also my perception. So emotions can be manipulated.
Yes, but the point is that there is a lot of manipulation around us. And as we become more aware, we can become more aware of what causes us to have these feelings. But for me to be able to put names to what I feel at all is the first step of acceptance. And to feel, say, anger or envy, those are generally forbidden things.
Then, in fact, the first step in thinking is to be aware of these feelings, to be reflective, to be able to formulate for ourselves what our feelings are. So the aim is to be able to recognise them and to be able to communicate them. What does that lead to, or what is the next step if we can manage them?
Separating emotions from thoughts. Often someone will say to me, I feel that you don’t love me. This is a simple example and we always understand what he means. It is not grammatically incorrect, but what I really mean is that you don’t love me. The feeling here is mostly disappointment. This becomes an important distinction again in self-awareness, that my disappointment can certainly be valid, but that you don’t love me is either true or not. And it may or may not be true, it is from here on an idea, an individual point of view. We won’t necessarily be able to share truth in that.
After the self-realisation, the separation of thoughts and feelings, is there a next step?
The steps of nonviolent communication are observation, feeling, need, request. Making observations is very important to me now, and we play a lot with this: how to observe without judgment.
Observing myself or others?
To observe. In relation to myself, in relation to others, in general, it’s again a very important little learning process to be able to do that. Recognizing when there is a value judgment in something. If I say Adam is looking pompous with his glasses, that’s clearly a value judgment. Or if I say Adam is looking at me curiously, that is also a value judgment. But if I say, ‘As I speak,’ I keep seeing Adam’s gaze, and he nods. That is an observation. There is no value judgment in that. In the world we are heading into, it becomes impossible to find truth. And the way out of this manipulation is self-knowledge, to recognize our own functioning.
And then you said the self-delusions.
The aim is to reduce the number of self-deceptions to a minimum, because that’s what cripples society, and that’s how we become exploitable. And really it’s all about people healing in relationships, we are social beings. So I see the definition of God as being in relationship. God is an interaction between two things, and everything exists from that. And so it’s important to develop the tools of connection.
It’s also important that you say that, because so far what you’ve said has been very much based on the development of the individual. But to say that the development of the means of connection is an equally important goal is to bring the issue to the level of the community, to the level of society.
Yes, it’s a bigger thing. When a person talks about their emotions and recognizes them, it leads to the goal of not having that connection hindered.
You mentioned nonviolent communication.
I like to distinguish between feelings, behaviors, attitudes and needs. So caring is not a feeling, it is a behavior. But what are the needs of a person who is caring? Or if a person is aggressive with a subordinate and makes him feel that he doesn’t like working with him, what is his need? He may actually be afraid and his need would be to feel safe. If I recognise this, I am not reacting to a threat, but to a fear, and it becomes more manageable.
So recognizing needs, safety, love, appreciation, challenges, can all be needs. And the feelings that are called negative arise as a result of unmet needs. This, in the end, contributes again to a lot of self-awareness. And the last step in nonviolent communication is asking, which is very difficult. What exactly am I asking you to do, in a way that is also non-judgmental?
With the children you work with in, say, Ludányhalászi, do you include their situation, their location, their skin colour, in addition to the compulsory curriculum? Do they discover connections with their own situation, the situations they find themselves in, the feelings they experience, the anger and frustrations they have?
It’s up to them really to get involved. My distancing method is that I will talk about it through Toldi. And it is through Toldi (an epic poem that is part of the Hungarian curriculum) that we can talk about power, how power is used. I think that’s the big trick. If their mental health is right, that will affect change in politics without me ever saying what I think is right or wrong. So I guess my answer leans more towards the no side.
But the question is, how long does self-reflection last? I think the way society works is that we essentially accept its norms. It says, well if you’re a gypsy, you have to work harder to achieve the same thing or the same level of confidence in, say, a workplace as someone who is not a gypsy.
This is exactly the topic that comes up a lot, although I think it is not so much a problem for primary school children in Ludányhalászi, but rather for, say, a Roma kid from Hengersor, who is the only Roma in a class of 30. At the same time, if you are equipped with self-awareness, then this is not really a threat to you, because you will come to accept something that you should have gone against.
But then, does that also apply to the goal that you’ve stated, that we should not lie to ourselves, that we should recognize the lies that are social lies and that we have made them our own?
That’s right. In the first place, if a child has already reached the point where, when he is called a gypsy, he can identify within himself that this causes him fear, disappointment, anger, he will not go any further, because he will know that it is okay if he is angry because of this sentence, and that some of his needs are now being violated. And if he just realises that what he is doing is a coping strategy, he can recognise that he has been a „good Gypsy” and forgive himself for denying it or being ashamed because he can say them to himself.
You mentioned the Toldi so much. How do you start thinking about it? What aspects of Toldi do you think about when you think about it that you will have to deal with it?
Actually, I start to analyse and interpret the characters and situations with the children according to these, what they feel, what they think, what need is being violated. What would you do in his place?

How do you choose which situation to take for example for a lesson? In Toldi, there are quite a few.
These situations have somehow chosen themselves. I did a Toldi evening once, and then I did eight songs. Their texts are the nodes where I found situations that I think children can identify with. For example, at the beginning, the way Toldi longs to be a soldier, we can talk about who longs for what, have you ever felt like you’re good enough for something but you don’t get the chance? Is there something that you said was out of reach for you, but you’d be good there? Art helps in this, because when someone sings „szép magyar leventék, aranyos vitézek, / Jaj, be keservesen…” (beautiful Hungarian soldiers / Oh, how bitterly I wish…), children can relate to this through art, this longing and pain is generated in them, and they can express how they feel, and in comparison to this, it will be a sharp change to say ‘Hey, peasant, which way to Buda?’
Then the whole next scene comes out of this humiliation of longing, and everyone can react to that, everyone has experiences of humiliation, disappointment, anger.
When you say that you select scenes from Toldi that have some kind of strong emotional charge that is recognizable and that children can relate to, disappointment or humiliation, it may not be emotional anymore.
Yes, in humiliation there is already a certain amount of judgement, it is said that these are preceded by thought, that humiliation is something you have done to me.
But as conditions, they’re pretty common in children’s lives.
It’s when you have to talk about what needs are being violated – my need for dignity, my need for recognition, my need to fulfil my desires, my need to dream.
Do you work with Toldi in such a way that you don’t necessarily read it as a text, but that the children hear it as a song?
Yes, they get these nodes in some kind of art form. For it not to remain theoretical, but to become a real experience, so that there is real disappointment, anger, fear, suffering, loss, art will be able to do that.
We now understand what happens to the good Toldi there. Where to next?
Actually, the Toldi, if I’ve said it all the way through, is a full mental hygiene trip.
How do you relate it to your own life?
I’m always careful with that, but it usually happens on its own. If I ask a question, have you ever longed for something that’s unattainable, they’ll often throw something in. I try very hard to ask a question that I don’t know the answer to so that it is never an exam. So it’s usually natural, it’s quite easy to develop, but I try to keep my distance here and it’s not my job to get into someone’s grief. Art knows this too, and here again I leave the responsibility to art, that if you think of your father in prison when Toldi says goodbye to his mother, it’s probably okay, and it’s healing. But for me to start asking that in a class, and to go into it more, is a crossing of the line.
And then whether we move on from there into creation is a question. This is determined by the group. I usually write texts, and Toldi is in semiquavers, then writing text in semiquavers with a class that has just been through such an emotional rollercoaster is not difficult.
But you then take it further into independent creation, linked to the aesthetic framework of the work you are dealing with.
When there is the possibility and space to do so, yes. In the same spirit, we ask questions, and then it’s interesting to ask, for example, what are we doing right now? There are so many ways of answering that in a witty way, from sitting, or being bored, or creating, or whatever, and they say much better things. Again, that’s the thrill of this free association, I think, is that there’s a blank form that they have to associate with four syllable or six syllable or three syllable elements based on an external rule. For example, rain-bow-col-ourd, that’s four syllables, that’s fine. How is it rainbowed? How does rainbow make you feel? Excited, cheerful, exhilarated. We usually end with that, at the end we make observations, ask ourselves questions, you can honestly say everything. A free association poem like this gives you exactly the mood we’re sitting in at the end. And we were only looking for four syllables in the room.