Getting ready for Christmas

Christmas parties, religious and secular events, joint ritual performances, concerts in performance halls, in the open air, and even at the Pivdenny Train Station will blend painting, theater, music, architecture, cinema, poetry, graphics, and photography into one cultural-informational field. Family and mass celebrations, a vertep parade, a procession of goatherders, a bell-ringers’ competition, and youth concerts will all end with the eating of kutia and a solemn mass plunge into water on the Feast of the Jordan.

The organizers of the Ukrainian Christmas project are pursuing the overarching goal of demonstrating the richness of Ukrainian Christmas themes and presenting a unique image of Ukraine to the world. Ideally, the project will become an incentive for synergetic resonances among culture, mass media, government, and business circles in order to accumulate Ukrainian social capital. Kyrylo STETSENKO, the project’s main producer, director, and scriptwriter, talked to The Day about the festival’s drawing cards.

“The idea for such a cultural, artistic, and social megaproject arose in 1998, when the Kyrylo Stetsenko Fund was set up in my grandfather’s honor. He was a musical genius, who left 50 masterful adaptations of Ukrainian carols (koliadky and shchedrivky), and Christmas time is the perfect opportunity to perform them. Unfortunately, our artistic groups perform only 10 to 20 percent of this heritage. Another thing: now that Ukraine has regained its independence, it simply must win back its cultural space from the colonial past and become a self-sufficient and powerful country. To win back one’s cultural space is to win back one’s soul. The Ukrainian Christmas project is simply an attempt to master part of our consciousness, revive the Ukrainian perception of time, revive winter ritual celebrations and performances, and restore the distinctive Ukrainian worldview. In this way we are opening the future for ourselves.

“Even though the project was conceived in 1998, it began to materialize only nine years later, in 2007. Two factors helped make it happen. The first one is the year of the 125th anniversary of my grandfather’s birth. Its celebration was supported by the president of Ukraine, but its implementation was paralyzed by political disagreements. However, when I took a sober look at our political situation, I realized that we are in dire straits: the ship of state has entered the reef zone because the anniversaries of such humanitarian beacons of the nation as Meletii Smotrytsky and Ivan Ohiienko are not being celebrated.

“The second factor is the active public. Liubov Lavrynenko, a champion of culture and arts, and Valentyna Kuzyk, a musicologist, decided to launch a series of concerts to perform my grandfather’s romances and religious works. They got Father Borys, the provost of St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, interested in the project. I became involved too and realized that my grandfather’s religious works are very significant, and because he authored more adaptations of Ukrainian carols than anyone else, it would be good to show his vast heritage in its entirety. So this project will be a kind of presentation of the religious and spiritual works of Kyrylo Stetsenko. That is why the festival will feature the Kyrylo Stetsenko Competition for Ukrainian Spiritual Choral Music: a model competition to be followed by its all-Ukrainian and international successors.”

Are you planning to recreate all the winter rituals at the festival?

“Don’t misunderstand me: I am not going to reconstruct all the rituals on the museum level and create an ethnographic theater-museum. Our project has a social rather than a scholarly-ethnographic nature. Of course, we are consulting museum specialists, ethnographers, and historians.

“We want people to find meaning in these rituals from the standpoint of modernity. This is an opportunity to fit one’s soul into the context of our nation’s history. We need spiritual-psychological consolidation. Let me give you two examples of this kind of spiritual unity action: first, the Unity Chain from Lviv to Kyiv in 1989, and second, the action “Light a Candle!” Our festival is an attempt to establish a new tradition called “Joint Koliada,” when on Christmas Eve (Jan. 6) people, coordinated by national radio and television, will sing carols together. There will also be a “Koliada on the Maidan,” where carols will be sung on the Maidan or Mykhailivska Square, and the lyrics will be displayed on a huge screen for the benefit of those who don’t know them. There is a program called “Karaoke on the Maidan” and we will hold a “Karaoke for the Maidan,” a fundamentally different genre, which is both traditionally Ukrainian and innovative. The blend of customs and innovations is a remarkable feature of our project in general.”

What are you planning to do next year and what are you going to do to surprise the residents of Kyiv?

“I have a lot plans but the main ones include organizing a Rock Vertep at the Sports Palace and ethnographic Christmas performances in a variety of styles (rock, pop, hip-hop, R’n’B, and breakdancing), and a youth disco called “Christmas Mortar.” My dream is to organize a laser show with colored holograms in the night sky, accompanied by a music program that will be performed in sync by Ukrainian choirs and the orchestra at the National Philharmonic Society, the National Conservatory, the Ukrainian House, and Ukraine’s National Opera Theater. On the Maidan festive crowds of people will watch the performance displayed on the screens and the holograms in the sky, while the audiences in the performance halls will see the concert first-hand and watch the atmosphere on the streets.”