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Introduction
Celebratory and festive activities occupy an important place in contemporary art pedagogy, although their upbringing and educational potential is not being utilized in full. At the same time, the educational space is starting to experience the predominance of technocratic learning activities that focus on rational thinking and learning new information while lacking the emotional and behavioral experiences necessary for students’ personal development.
This trend has inevitably affected the state of art pedagogy, which is increasingly prioritizing students’ mastery of technical skills and abilities in accordance with the standards and requirements for performance activity, while the experience of independent assimilation of artistic and aesthetic values is in a deficit.
In connection with this, the organization of celebratory activities is becoming especially demanded by art pedagogy as an opportunity for the development of personal creative potential in diverse active behavioral and performative forms of artistic and aesthetic activity.
Therefore, the search for celebratory activity technologies creating the necessary prerequisites for individual creativity and interaction in celebratory and gaming forms is becoming especially relevant.
Another problem of art pedagogy, for which the use of celebration as a special form of artistic and aesthetic activity is a relevant solution, cannot be overlooked - it is the problem of students’ motivation to master certain types of artistic and creative activity. Organized celebration space has the potential to form such motivation, which is also still underutilized in real artistic and pedagogical practice.
The main hypothesis of the study is that a celebration as an instrument of art pedagogy has to focus primarily on stimulating and developing the creative spontaneity of its participants, from the initial level of mastering the skills of artistic and playful behavior, to the highest level of creative improvisational activity in socially significant artistic forms.
Literature review
The study of celebration as a sociocultural phenomenon in its various aspects has a long tradition. The history of celebration culture has been studied by Streltsov (2003); Kiseleva & Krasilnikov (2004); Gagin (2005); Avanesova (2006); Zharkov (2007); Riabkov (2007); and other researchers; the social essence of celebratory and play culture was explored by Blinova (1997); Ariarskii (2001). Tthe specifics of the technology and scriptwriting and directing work on the organization of mass cultural and leisure events, including theatrical celebrations and performances were researched by Mazaev (1978); Panfilov (2004); Gagin (2005), Kamenets, et al. (2016, 2019), and others.
The link between celebrations and mythology has been investigated by Campbell (1997); and Caillois (2003). Durkheim (1995), devoted much attention to studying the opposition between the sacred and the profane, which is important for understanding the essence of celebration. The study of celebration culture is also quite common in various ethnographic studies. Celebration is examined by representatives of various scientific disciplines including folkloristics, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, and art history.
Accordingly, the study of celebration as a socio-cultural phenomenon involves the following approaches: consideration of celebration in the historical and cultural context; the study of celebration in the system of club pedagogy; celebration as a separate mass event organized in accordance with the requirements of the direction of theatrical actions. Each of these aspects of the study of celebration has its own value as the closest to artistic pedagogy. The historical and cultural study of this phenomenon provides the organizers and researchers of celebration in the context of art pedagogy with knowledge of the historically established cultural meanings attributed to a particular celebration. The study of celebration as a club event provides knowledge about the pedagogical potential of informal interpersonal communication that contributes to the creation of a festive community. The accumulated experience of scriptwriting and directing technologies can be used to stimulate the co-participation of different population groups in a given celebration and increase the artistic and aesthetic level of a celebration as a finalized event.
At the same time, celebration as a phenomenon of art pedagogy remains virtually unexplored. In this regard, it is necessary to distinguish between celebrations as a rather spontaneous form of social and cultural activity and celebrations as purposeful pedagogically oriented activities involving a special “unit” of professionals providing for the implementation of certain technologies of celebration in accordance with the social, cultural, educational, and pedagogical tasks facing society (Sharoev, 2009). The present article considers mainly the second type of celebration as a socio-cultural phenomenon. It must be noted, however, that there is no insurmountable boundary between the two types of celebrations and festivities. Their interrelation and mutual influence are one of the important mechanisms of the formation and development of celebration culture in society.
Methodology
The current study is designed as a planned exploration of the results of the theory and methodology of organizing celebrations as events having a particular pedagogical impact on its participants based on a retrospective analysis of the established Russian experience of research into the celebration phenomenon relevant to the tasks of art pedagogy. The conducted study is of qualitative nature and allows revealing the limitations of the traditional examination of the phenomenology of celebration solely as an opposition to the mundane. This conclusion is derived as a result of semantic analysis of interpretations of the concept of “celebration” provided by the representatives of various scientific disciplines.
In the study of celebration as an instrument of art pedagogy, of relevance is the methodological problem of allocating the parts of celebratory events in one way or another related to the tasks of artistic education and upbringing. Considering that the number and scale of contemporary celebrations are not measurable and encompass public, religious, professional, family, corporate, and other types of celebrations, determining boundaries of the celebration space of art pedagogy remains an urgent task for researchers and organizers of celebratory events with artistic and aesthetic content.
Accordingly, the existing classifications of celebrations turn out to be unsuitable for use as a basic typology since no stable types of celebrations that can be decidedly attributed to the instruments of art pedagogy can be identified. It is more appropriate to establish the objective of studying the conditions necessary for a certain celebration to acquire the qualities of such an instrument.
This objective calls for the study of celebration as a socio-cultural phenomenon in the context of the pedagogical process of art education and upbringing, the main content of which is moral and aesthetic upbringing focused on mastering the ideals of “goodness and beauty”, art education, and developing the skills of creative self-realization by artistic and aesthetic means. Accordingly, organized celebrations as an instrument of art pedagogy should in one way or another contribute to resolving these problems.
The conducted study involves an axiological analysis of the existing system of celebrations from the point of the possibilities of them reflecting socially significant ideals. The content of celebrations as art pedagogy instruments has to contribute to the formation of the celebrants’ expectations and images of the desired reality in accordance with the conscious moral and aesthetic ideals.
An important condition for the validity of celebrations as an instrument of art pedagogy is ensuring the real involvement of all celebrants as active participants in the festive act. Analysis of the existing practice of art education and upbringing shows that spontaneous behavior of celebrants in artistic and aesthetic forms is the condition most demanded by modern art pedagogy.
In accordance with these research parameters, the present study examines the experience of celebrations of artistic and pedagogical nature.
Development
The study of the established practice of celebration organization in the context of art pedagogy as a component of the process of upbringing and students’ personality development allows identifying the moral and aesthetic ideals as the most desirable for the organization of the corresponding festive events. Said ideals include the ideals of patriotism, harmony between man and nature, love for one’s neighbor, public service, and humanity and humanism. The listed ideals determine the choice of appropriate celebration repertoire and content of celebrations as instruments of art pedagogy.
The aforementioned ideals correspond to the established cultural traditions and spiritual experiences of the peoples of Russia, which have been formed and transmitted from generation to generation throughout Russian history. The very nature of these ideals allows for a new interpretation of the ambivalence of celebration indicated by Bakhtin (1990). Traditionally, the latter has been interpreted as the triumph of the “corporeal” and “grassroots culture” in the process of celebration, as an opportunity to change the existing “ideal” and “high”. This is precisely the target at which the corresponding festive freedom should aim.
In the Russian celebration tradition, the ambivalence mainly lies in the opposite shift - the triumph of the “ideal” over the imperfections of the material world, the “corporeal bottom” (Bakhtin, 1990) (Gagin, 2005). On this basis, such “holiday idealism” is commonly assessed both in scientific literature and public opinion as taking the celebrants away from real life to contrived mythologies and imposed ideologemes.
Analysis of Soviet celebration culture provides ample evidence for this due to the deideologization and regimentation of many celebratory events in the form of “programs of rejoicing” imposed “from above”, which had transformed celebrations into “official”, “public” celebrations. For all the costs of such festive “officiousness”, it resulted in the accumulation of vast experience in stage direction and pedagogical techniques, which, if used creatively, could also be in demand in contemporary art pedagogy.
This, however, can only become possible with the saturation of the value content of modern celebration culture with new humanistic ideas with the central place being attributed to patriotism paired with humanism and care for all living things. It is this combination of ideals that can create celebratory enthusiasm in society while combining a caring attitude toward each person with the need to serve society and people.
For all the value of the various existing classifications of celebrations as applied to the tasks of art pedagogy, a classification of celebrations by the level of social interaction between the participants and, accordingly, the various tasks of socialization and artistic and creative development of an individual appears the most promising.
The aforementioned criterion provides for identifying celebrations attributable to the social micro-level, meso-level, macro-level, and mega-level based on the paradigm of social interaction proposed by one of the authors (Kamenets, 2015). Each level is thus associated with its own type of celebratory spontaneity having specific artistic and pedagogical potential.
Micro-level celebrations can include family celebrations and celebrations focused on certain social groups and communities where informal interpersonal relationships and interactions prevail (Tulchinskii, et al., 2010). These can be birthdays, family anniversaries, corporate holidays, etc. These celebrations can acquire artistic and pedagogical orientation if there is an appropriate stable leisure community in which informal interactions and interpersonal communication are supported largely due to the possibility of direct spontaneous manifestation of positive emotions towards each other by the members of the celebration community. What can be a natural manifestation of this spontaneity is joint singing, dancing, and festive playful behavior promoting the skills of self-directing in a celebratory interaction setting.
A typical form of such communities are literary and music salons, music lounges, art clubs, etc. The creation of such unions is one of the prerequisites for the organic involvement of their participants in celebration programs, in which joint music-making, artistic and cognitive activity, and composing are appropriate in an environment where “everyone knows each other”. The very content of a certain artistic and creative activity and the corresponding festivities in this case serves, above all, as a means of creating an atmosphere of friendliness, mutual sympathy, love, etc.
Meso-level celebrations largely imply a competitive component in the form of creative contests and competitions. Artistic and performing activities here contribute to the formation of a sense of “We” and an individual’s own identity as a participant of “their” team, a creative collective, even if it is temporary. In this case, the given artistic and aesthetic activity combines an individual and personal essence with the established competitive and game rules obligatory for all participants. What can be considered a typological example of such a community is KVN, which are especially popular among youth and provide an opportunity to express oneself both individually and in a group to each performer, which, unfortunately, have been transformed into pre-rehearsed theatrical performances and lost their original spontaneity and improvisationality to a large extent.
Macro-level celebrations mainly include state holidays, professional holidays, holidays associated with certain dates significant for the nation, etc. This level encompasses a variety of professional performers in different kinds of artistry. Here purely artistic criteria of public performance come to the fore. However, due to the predominance of professional groups and performers, this level bears the problem of preventing the transformation of celebration into a theatrical performance or a concert leaving no room for artistic and creative spontaneity to all those wishing to express themselves as active participants of the festive action.
Analysis of the practice of organizing celebrations of artistic and pedagogical nature indicates that an opportunity to resolve this issue is presented by a strategy of anticipatory recruitment of appropriate creative groups and individual performers ready to attract as many spectators and listeners as possible to an accessible, “one-time” celebratory activity.
Celebrations that can be attributed to the mega-level include those held at an international and worldwide level (for example, the “World Festival of Youth and Students”, celebrations being part of international creative competitions in specific types of artistry, etc.). The perspective of participating in such festive events may serve as an additional incentive for many members of artistic and creative collectives and performers in various types of art and creativity. At this level, celebratory spontaneity can be provided for by the participants’ awareness of universal human ideals and values and their expression in spontaneous art-performance forms. Said awareness and expressions can, in turn, be ensured through the appropriate organization of the celebration.
It is important to note that in building the entire artistic and pedagogical process with the use of festive technologies, it is necessary to initially focus on a relatively stable group of students, who should then gradually “mature” as they master more and more knowledge, skills, and abilities in the field of artistic culture and transition from the micro-level to the subsequent social levels of artistic and aesthetic activity.
When utilizing a celebration as an instrument of art pedagogy, such immediate spontaneity must be developed and improved and not replaced by professional performance purely as a public demonstration of the achievements of creative groups and individual performers.
In this regard, of immense importance is ensuring that aside from the regular rehearsal and training, students regularly participate in celebratory events of all levels in succession. The highest level of spontaneity is students’ readiness for creative improvisation, which is especially demanded at the macro- and mega-level of celebration and aims at involving as many participants as possible in a variety of celebratory activities. This kind of activity also requires appropriate performance training. As a vivid example of this highest level of spontaneity, many folklore festivals can “infect” with their festivity a huge number of spectators and participants who are ready to respond by displaying certain festive and playful behavioral reactions (Anufrieva, 2013).
To determine the corresponding pedagogical potential of celebration, it is worth referring to M.M. Bakhtin’s understanding of celebration culture in his prominent work devoted to F. Rabelais and the medieval carnival, which has become the main methodological basis for most Russian researchers in the field of celebration study (Bakhtin, 1990). Here we will mostly focus on the artistic and pedagogical potential of celebration, which, if not explicitly, then potentially lies in the interpretation of celebration as a cultural phenomenon in Bakhtin’s research.
In the aforementioned work, the author formulates the following conceptual provisions, which can be viewed as fundamental for an artistic and pedagogical study of celebration in its most developed form - as a carnival:
celebration has an ambiguous nature manifesting through combinations and mutual transitions from “funny” to “serious”, from “high” to “low”, from “bodily” to “spiritual”, etc.;
these mutual transitions show the orientation of festivity on rejecting the obsolete and proclaiming the new and viable in the coming future;
an important component of the morphology and content of celebration is the folk culture of laughter in the form of grotesques, parodies, and “tearing off the masks”, which create a special aesthetic of the very process of involvement in the celebratory action;
a celebration is not a reflection of the reality of life but life itself portrayed in a special playful way;
the celebratory life reality is a sharp contrast to everyday life forming a special state of festive freedom and emotional uplift, as well as creating conditions for spontaneous playful behavior.
These provisions can be topically comprehended in the context of art pedagogy. The ambivalence of celebration examined by Bakhtin (1990), was mainly due to the emerging transition to the Renaissance and the corresponding criticism of the outmoded ideals of medieval culture. It is important to note, however, that these ideals were still a result of the dominance of Christian values in medieval society. For modern Russian art pedagogy, on the contrary, it is important to have ideals of social significance, since if these ideals are absent, then the very possibility of any ambivalence disappears (there is no polarization of “high” and “low” for lack of the former).
Emphasis on the formation and development of creative spontaneity in the organization of celebrations allows reformulating the issue of providing resources for the celebrations of artistic and pedagogical nature. Celebrations are commonly considered the most expensive events since they imply a large number of participants, the appropriate material and technical base, and the involvement of professional performers. This “resource” logic suggests that above all else, a celebration must meet the criteria of a high artistic level, be perfect in all its components, and eliminate all randomness undesirable for the artistic impression.
Such an “aesthetic” attitude rules out any improvisation and spontaneity of self-expression as such. Thus, such “festivals” easily turn into well-coordinated, rehearsed spectacles, which “kills” their festive spontaneity; they follow the laws of theatrical performance implying an unambiguous division of those present into the performers and the spectators and listeners.
The inner orientation of art pedagogy toward the maximum use of the possibilities of celebration as its instrument means a gradual increase in the level of students’ spontaneity, beginning with non-reflexive creative self-expression and ending with a gradual mastery of knowledge, skills, and abilities of creative independence and improvisation based on a skillful combination of performing techniques depending on the given celebratory situation.
At present, based on the results of special research, we can classify such situations by the increasing degree of mastery of independence and reflexivity in interpersonal interaction (Kamenets, 2015). A situation of the first initial level is a micro-level interaction, in which art pedagogy can mostly focus on motivating students to independent self-expression in celebratory and playful forms allowing to identify the level of innate artistic and creative abilities and psychological and other features of a student’s personality significant for solving artistic and creative and artistic-educational tasks. Here it can be noted that back in primitive society, the lower level of spontaneity served as a prerequisite for the development of celebration culture.
The second level of spontaneity (a meso-level situation) forms the readiness and ability to use the acquired knowledge, skills, and abilities to position oneself as a creative individual as a member of a particular community or group (Kamenets, 2015).
The third, even higher level of spontaneity implies the ability to improvise and realize one’s potential in a variety of scenic situations and before different audiences. Finally, at the highest level, spontaneity constantly accompanies any student participation in various artistic and aesthetic forms of social interaction. The student themselves, in this case, becomes a carrier of celebration culture involving other participants in a festive event in various festive and playful activities in artistic and aesthetic forms (Kamenets, 2015).
Meanwhile, the study of celebratory and playful and performing spontaneity presents probably the most relevant research objectives of practical significance given the use of celebration as an art pedagogy method. The modern technocratized and computerized society turns many individuals into consumers of externally imposed cultural contexts and unsystematic redundant information devoiding them of functioning as active creative subjects, in which artistic culture plays an essential role.
Moreover, if the celebrators themselves are considered as the main resource of organizing a celebration, then it turns out that the organization of holidays and festivities requires minimal resources. On the other hand, this perspective suggests greater importance of scriptwriting and directing and game technologies, which initiate and stimulate celebratory spontaneity via artistic and aesthetic means. As previously noted, the first step in this direction is creating a stable artistic and aesthetic environment for the interaction of the lovers of leisure pastime, in which an important place is occupied by a variety of artistic and creative and artistic-educational activities available to all members of a given leisure community.
The creation of such an environment has to be the main goal of the corresponding specialists in the field of art pedagogy, which calls for their appropriate training as social technologists and organizers of social interaction of artistic and aesthetic orientation.
The subject-oriented approach to organizing celebrations as art pedagogy instruments also requires the participation of specialists in organizing the celebration and play activities, specialists from various organizations and agencies interested in celebration and play activities, and the involvement of the population itself.
Each of these participant groups may have its own “function” in providing resources for celebratory events. The group of actual organizers of a celebration can include specialists in the field of art pedagogy, scriptwriters and directors, concertmasters, decorators, etc. Herein it is worth noting that the demand for and the composition of these specialists can vary depending on the nature and scale of the celebration. Nevertheless, the decisive role has to be reserved for specialists in art pedagogy focusing on mass participation in a variety of celebratory activities of artistic and aesthetic orientation. The organization of the celebrations itself becomes a project activity involving all stakeholders at all stages of design.
Of particular note is the importance of the task of maximizing the interaction of all members of the celebration community, which is a rather unconventional creative task for the organizers of a celebration (Kamenets, 2015). The established technologies of a wide variety of theatrical acts focus primarily on scripting and directing unidirectional effects on the audience of viewers and listeners, whose activity is reduced to reactions to what is happening on stage and in stage performances. Meanwhile, artistic and aesthetic and playful forms of interaction between the viewers and listeners themselves are typically not included in scriptwriting and directing.
Replenishing this deficit in the organization and conduct of celebrations also presents an important professional objective. Meanwhile, such interaction also has an important pedagogical role as it corresponds to the very nature of celebratory and playful behavior. In the “natural” conditions of celebrating something, the social and pedagogical meaning of such interactions lies in a kind of social and cultural practice that forms the experience of considering the interest of others and the desire for collective activity in unobtrusive and unregulated forms, where there is no pragmatic and selfish interest in the “other”.
Social interaction allows forming an ethic of celebration and game behavior, where there can be no “losers” and “winners”, where “friendship wins” and a positive experience of the program participants’ mutual empathy and interest in each other prevails.
Celebrations organized in the artistic and pedagogical context present a kind of artistic and aesthetic modeling of reality in its humanistic form, the demand for which is ever-increasing.
Given this formulation of the problem, of particular importance is the mastery of acting techniques and the skills of acting behavior, which contributes to the acquisition of personal self-identity (Huizinga, 2007).
The focus on using celebration as an instrument of art pedagogy requires a corresponding reorganization of the entire process of introducing creative collectives and individual performers to artistic culture and artistic and performing activity.
The traditional rehearsals and training sessions of students have to be supplemented by unregulated, artistically rich leisure time organized according to the club or salon principle. Of great effect in this regard can also be the appropriate selection of educational repertoire, which can include pieces planned for a future festive event. At present, such a task may be assigned to the heads of institutions of culture and education, where the preparation of festivities is not an additional workload but an organic part of the entire educational process.
Conclusions
The conducted study of the interpretations of celebration as a social phenomenon established in science, the real practice of organizing celebrations, and the tradition of celebration scriptwriting and directing technologies allows concluding on the importance of redefining celebratory events as instruments of art pedagogy opposing the dominance of the “subject-object” informational influences given the deficit of independent creative “subjectivity” in modern society. In this regard, holiday technologies have an important role and their main property, according to our hypothesis, lies in the development of celebratory spontaneity as a social rehabilitation for victims of unidirectional influences of the social and informational environment.
The obtained results can become the ground for further research on pedagogically significant celebratory spontaneity as an effective instrument of artistic pedagogy.
