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Christmas Parties in the Hermitage'sYouth
Educational Center In keeping with tradition at the Youth Educational Center, students have Christmas and New Year's parties there at the end of December. This time, in the period just before New Year's, the young people prepared two events at once. On 24 December, the section in the Student Club called Lo studio italiano presented Christmas in Art in the Rumyantsev Mansion on the Angliiskaya Embankment: in this evening party they brought together various art forms - music, literature, painting - to illustrate the medieval epoch in all its diversity. Whereas last year they offered to participants a party "in the rhythm of the 60's" and presented Italy as it was in the 1960's, this time the students took their inspiration from the period of the Crusades and reverence for Our Lady; from the age of knights and paladins. The evening included the poetic fantasy Joseph Brodsky's Christmas Verses and Paintings of the Old Masters, as well as the dances of medieval Europe - A Gift for the Virgin Mary. The students were assisted in preparing and staging the event by outside dance and musical groups: the Vilanella School of ancient dances and the Rondo children's music studio. On 25 December, the Youth Center was the venue for one further Christmas event entitled Under Gabriel's Benevolent Wing which was prepared by students in the Artist and Poet section. In this literary and musical composition, the students related the traditions of celebrating Christmas and also told how people bid farewell to the outgoing year and ring in the New Year in various countries. They drew from the poems of Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martinus Neuhof, and Ivan Bunin and also from works by Western European masters of painting to embody the Evangelical history from the Annunciation to the Nativity. "How you meet the New Year foretells what kind of a year it will be." This is what the well-known superstition tells us, and the young people of Petersburg who take part in the various activities of the sections of the Student Club at the State Hermitage's Youth Educational Center try to stay close to the traditions that have developed over many years. |
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