Mykhailo CHEMBERZHI: “The child is born a genius, then he becomes gifted, then capable, and then like everybody else”

Who of you is not familiar with the rapture in the drawings of little artists or the skillful playing of young musicians? Small fingers that create big art are a truly touching vision. “While somebody defines childhood as a wonder he at the same moment claims to us that this wonder is nothing but the early mastering of adult skills,” Roland Barthes said about the phenomenon of early children’s gifted nature. However, as the main reason for mythologizing of young talents, the philosopher considered the adoration by bourgeois society of the object capable of “performing the model function of any capitalist activity, winning time.”

It is thus little wonder that in our times of the total capitalization, informization, and automation of society the issue of early professional orientation, especially in such a specific sphere as art, has arisen in Ukraine as well. Despite all the speculations of skeptics, Mykhailo CHEMBERZHI, founder and the rector of the Children’s Academy of Arts, sincerely adheres to the concept of continuous higher education in art. He is convinced that childhood is the most creative period of life and it is a crime to lose this time. Four and five year old children come to his academy to study the theater, art, choreography, musical faculties to become what? Geniuses? And what if they fail? What if a small artist grows up and his talent stays in short pants? On the one hand, the concept of education put forward and implemented by Mykhailo Chemberzhi, his Children’s Academy of Arts is an efficient alternative to a routine kindergarten with poorly educated teachers and pauper secondary school with its stick discipline. On the other hand is this not an attempt to tame the child’s talent, or even simply to use the child as a pretty toy?

Is it necessary at all to teach art to children, or does it mean just imposing cliches on them?

I deal with the organization of professional creative education. I believe that the system of continuous higher education for art is the task of modern life, for the main thing is not to lose the talent present in the child. Transferring from one establishment to another means programming losses. While our children come at four years and in one building, in a customary atmosphere which is very aesthetic, romantic, and professionally saturated, to get serious professional education. This is what I call a comfortable education.

I would say that adult talent is always sinful, an adult builds a great deal on logic, while children’s creative work is characterized by the energy of their sincerity, the value of which cannot be ignored. And aesthetic education built on the utilization of this sincerity can cause a powerful explosion in an artist’s career. Moreover, our children are immunized against the bacteria of low culture, low-grade kitsch, because from a very young age they get a powerful vitamin vaccination of high art and good taste.

Where does the children’s sincerity go? Does it disappear in the course of life or due to the education received?

Whether this sincerity disappears or not is a question subject to discussion. But we are trying to work so that the vaccination of high culture be permanent. This practice is used in medicine too: when a child is just born he immediately gets vaccinated, which protects him against certain diseases for the whole rest of his life. This is why, the earlier the child gets this aesthetic vaccination, the better, in my view, he will feel in the surrounding world. I am convinced that sincerity is not only a bottomless heart and tender soul, but also a good understanding of the world that comes from the information that the child can already perceive at an early age.

But the children feel compromise so organically, they so clearly catch what you want of them that it is really easier to teach them than to discover in them what is laid by the nature. What do you think about this?

Where does this organic penchant for currying favor come from? From the fact that the child sees no possibility of choice, that he has to listen to the authority of a teacher. From an early age we raise the child in atmosphere of multiple choice, and he permanently has the possibility to choose. “Be what I want you to” is the enemy of pedagogy. What’s needed is: “Be what you are, and we’ll help you.” I once said that we are dealing not with upbringing but with professional education that has the effect of upbringing.

Coming to you at the age of four or five years should the child upon completing the academy have become either a genius or nothing?

In addition to our higher college of the arts we have also opened a School of Arts, the main job of which is to provide multiple choice for the child that came to study with us. If he has already entered the vertical of professional creative education, we cannot say that you cannot, you’re not a genius, you have no talent, but that you can do but your talent is in another field, and to transfer him to another department of the academy where general arts are the same but creative subjects are studied in a general course. And this is a great thing, because if the person is highly educated, understands art, has refined taste, his or her work in any sphere will be highly intelligent — thorough, creative, full of inspiration and romanticism.

That is, you directly connect the intelligence of the person with his creative education?

Without doubt. Indeed, one who loves music, art, the theater is a romantic, while romanticism is the source of an inspired attitude toward life.

And do you also put moral qualities in one row?

Certainly.

Are you really convinced that genius and evil cannot go together?

I think we would have to clarify this for a very long time: what is genius and what is evil.

I would put it in a different way: what is your Academy trying to do, make Mozarts or Salieris?

Incidentally, Salieri was not a bad teacher, much better than Mozart. I want our pupils to be happy. And I think that they will be also because we teach them not to envy. And this is a very philosophical problem, one’s attitude toward the success of another person. We teach our children to be glad at the success of a friend, get them used to the thought that being first is not the final goal, and this rears in them the capability of being civilized leaders. We carry out psychological training aimed at concentration of effort at the moment when you sit down at the piano, and not when you, for example, are suffering behind the curtains or when you rehearse, but to explode that very moment when you play during the competition.

Is the issue of competition here connected with the fact that the children are striving not so much to play, draw, or dance better but to simply pay less for education?

You want to say this is bad? I consider immoral another position: however badly I study, my parents will pay all the same. We are an ambitious organization. We have 104 winners of international competitions, creative exhibitions all over the world, our children are dancing in the National Opera, and on television. They already live full creative lives. I do not understand at all why people think that life will start somewhere in the future. It is an illusion that you can live to be a hundred years and still able to work, although there are individuals like this. In reality the professional period in art is very short, but this is not a tragedy but optimistic knowledge, because only by concentrating your efforts to the fullest you can achieve something in art.

Don’t you think that from very early childhood you are getting the child used to greenhouse conditions of existence, and he leaves the walls of the academy and suddenly sees that the world is far from being just an art?

But think, when a child enters the academy at 8:30 and leaves it at 5:30, isn’t this hard work? Work is not only waving a shovel or going down a mine. We adapt them to very serious and hard activity. Whatever we say, the children very clearly feel the reality that they have to live in. The influence of our pedagogical techniques lays not in isolation, but in the ability of a child, when he or she encounter hardship, not to cry helplessly but to realize his or her own responsibility for this world, to strive to make this world better by virtue of his talent, his capabilities.

Do parents of a child have the right to select his future profession for him or it is impossible to avoid this in our time?

I would not like to speak about the globalization of this process, but our choice is unambiguous. In the art it would be a huge waste of resources not to use what the child can do from birth. I ask, why is it necessary to wait until 17-18 years to implement the creative capabilities that exist already from early childhood? If the child of 12-13 years is already the prizewinner of a dozen international competitions, isn’t he already a mature musician? Is it really necessary to become a veteran in order to play before the public?

I agree that the ten-year old boy can technically play Chopin, but will it really be Chopin by force of the far from childish feelings put into the work?

If it were so, let us say that Mozart was a young specialist. We underestimate children, consider them small naughty things, while they are really great philosophers. There is nothing stronger than their sincerity combined with talent. And I say that it is necessary to start creative education very early, otherwise we have the danger of losing the talent, not implementing what he can do even at the physical level: these small fingers that now carry out any configurations later become not so flexible. Our children sincerely do not understand how it is possible to have one’s first personal exhibition at the age of 50, as they start exhibiting already at seven. Instead, they will never be able to say, “I would have been able but I was not given the chance.” We have a different approach: we give everything, create conditions, but then you must ask only from yourself. I was honored to report about the concept of the academy at very serious scholarly forums, and it is very pleasing to me that I everywhere found support for my concept of continuous higher education, from preschool to the higher, including in the same building. For this model makes it possible, while preserving the capabilities of the child, to effectively give him new information that enriches his development.