In Slovenia there is a tradition of setting up a Christmas crib as a part of the preparations for the celebration. In our family we usually set up the classic infant Jesus, his mother Mary and Joseph miniatures. On our school however, there is an inter-class competition held every year. Each class (in Slovenia you enter a, so called, gymnasium, at 14 and study there for 4 years, then after that you can go to university) has to prepare its own nativity scene and include a presentation for the school. To mix things up a bit, each year there is a special emphasis on lets say a thought or a quote from the bible… This year the ‘theme’ was Don’t be afraid to accept. The judges in the end take in account originality, esthetics, message and the presentation.
Since I am the artsy person in the class, and have led the preparations past 2 years, I took over the organization of the project again. Our interpretation on the quote focused on Joseph and his acceptance of Mary and Jesus. Basically on his trust towards Mary.
In the early stages we decided that we are going to generalize the acceptance theme to for everyday life and people living today. So the point was to show that we should accept whatever life gives us and make the best of it. Weather its good or bad, its life. When we face problems and when our life challenges us we gain experience and resilience and when it presents us with something good, we should only be thankful.
We moved on with the idea of hands receiving. We imagined a male and female hand, receiving a child, or if we generalize it, receiving the good and bad in life. We then had to plan everything out, the materials, supplies, work-groups…
Every year we had given our everything and it paid off. 1st year we won amongst the first years, second year we won the esthetics award. We had worked really hard all 4 hours that had been given to us and had fun. Even though the atmosphere in the classroom was sometimes frantic and I was running up and down trying to help everyone, the work we had put in or creations made us feel proud of them. After the event we always kept the nativity scene in our class as long as we could, because we really loved seeing all pay off.
Well this year not much had changed, if anything we only became more ambitious. The plan was to make huge hands that would shock with the size alone. We had quite a few ideas, using wire and papier-mâché or plaster, using cardboard.. In the end, the hands had been made out of cardboard and Styrofoam. The day before the 4 hour work in school I cut out two different hands (female based on my, and male based on my father’s hand). I enlarged the traced hand on approximately a 1 meter length and cut it out of cardboard. This represented the ‘boning’ of the hand and prevented it from falling apart. The fingers were movable and the thumb had been cut out separately. On top of that I later glued pieces or about 10 to 15 cm thick Styrofoam and marked the jolts where the Styrofoam had to be cut and bent. I left that dry overnight and drove the whole thing to school.
The same day I made the hands, I stayed in the classroom afterschool with some of my classmates, working on the ‘background’ for our hands. The idea was to somehow replicate the famous painting Starry night by Vincent Van Gogh. We glued together 2 layers of cardboard pieces that held each other together and later made the whole construction stand in the back right corner of the classroom. We then drew 20x20cm square net onto the cardboard and transferred the small A4 sketch to the 2 m high and a bit less than 4 m wide surface. We then started to define the 3d character of the painting. The stars were made out of old newspapers shaped in half-sphere ‘hills’, the scenery on the bottom was made out of 3 layers of cardboard , indicating the distance, enhanced with buckwheat seeds. The tall slim trees were cut out of cardboard and taped over with bent parts of soft wire coated in paper and the shining stars and the moving sky was animated using wool, old newspapers and cardboard.
Overnight the thing dried so the next day everything was ready to be painted. I had a team work on the ‘floor’ of the scene, painting it dark blue and black and trying to create a feeling of depth, then there were quite a few people painting the scenery and 2 coordinated painters painting the sky (at the beginning there were more, but with a little time it showed that the more efficient way was to have less people that really knew what they were doing than a group of uncoordinated students). Half of the boys were working on the palms of the hands, cutting the Styrofoam with olfa knives. Girls that were not busy painting the scenery were cutting wave like shapes out of paper and coloring them. The colors ranged from black to yellow and then to white, creating a color gradient. The idea was to take the bad things (black) and make them become yellow (in the center of the sculpture) and to take white (good) and also make it become yellow. On these 30 cm pieces of paper we later put on events from a person’s life, presenting the challenges and the gifts (death, guilt, anger …, trust, birth, happiness…), taped them to a thin white string and had them hang of the walls, leading the eye of the spectator to the center, the hands.
Photo by Vida Jocif.People with a bit of a writer and/or actor sense in them were busy putting together a presentation. There was also a small group of people working on a tree (a bunch of twisted willow branches), on witch we later hanged names of every person in the class with a special quote meant especially for them. The rest of the class was working on Christmas cards for teachers or helping out here and there.
When most of the parts were finished we set up the scene, lifted the base of the floor with the leftover Styrofoam pieces put under it and prepared the class for visitors (rearranged the chairs, put the tables away). After the school was over, some of us stayed, to finish the hands. We secured the folds of the fingers with stretched out paper clips, connecting the two parts and keeping them bent, and then covered the whole thing in plaster strips to give it a clean polished finish and to unify the color.
Photo by Vida Jocif. Next day the presentation for the judges and audience took place. It had to be less than 5 min long, explaining the nativity scene and having some kind of spiritual impact on the viewer. Our storyline was talking about two people, happily together, getting their first child. The actors went through some shorter scenes of their relationship and then, there was the doctors meeting. The Specialist told them that their child will be born with a genetic dysfunction. The mother wanted to keep the child, but the father wasn’t sure whether they would be able to take on the responsibility to raise him and give him everything he needed. They got into a fight over the matter, but after some time, they both get back to each other apologize for the fighting and then together, accepted the baby with open arms. At the end they put a symbolic baby wrapped in yellow piece of cloth into the open plaster hands of the man and woman in the corner, and the narrator sums up the message of the play.
2nd photo by Vida Jocif. In the end we were nominated for the esthetics award, best presentation, and came in third in the general selection. I think we deserved better and at least top win the award for esthetic value. I am very proud of our work and I hope that next, the last, year we do even better and have as much fun as we had this year.
