Let's Create An Opera

Let’s Create an Opera has been successfully teaching children about the process of opera creation for over 10 years.  For the school involved it is a full year of creative and engaging team work towards a final product, a completely original opera, with the help of a team of opera professionals.  Beginning in the spring of the previous year, the teachers of the chosen school go through professional development with Calgary Opera’s Education and Outreach Coordinator.  She gives them information that they can in turn pass on to their students through the months of September, October and November. 

“The Let’s Create an Opera program is an amazing opportunity for our students and staff to experience a genre of music that is often less accessible in our small community,” says teacher and program participant Tashina Hanrath.  “The students are thrilled to be creating something that they had previously attributed only to experts or historical arts and are looking at opera in a whole new way.   We integrated our opera experience into our AISI project, using the arts to further unlock reading comprehension and literature for our students.  As each part of this process unfolds, my excitement to see the next step increases.”

The first step begins in September when a librettist goes into the class to work with the students to develop the words for the opera.  Often, a school will divide the tasks of opera creation amongst different classes, giving one section of students or a class the task of creating the libretto, another group the task of costume or set design and so on throughout the entire production process, all under the guidance of established Calgary artists.  In the New Year, the librettist steps back to allow the composer to begin his or her work, with the director taking over in the spring.

Dan Libman frequently takes on the role of librettist at Let's Create an Opera schools, and has also worked in the role of director in the past.  For him, participating in the Let’s Create an Opera program is truly unique and rewarding, so much so that he finds himself coming back year after year.

“I think the entire project is amazing. 99.9% of school kids think that the performance of theatre in a musical form means American musical theatre.  Even if the music they create is based on simple and popular forms, they are actually creating something from the ground up,” says Mr. Libman.  “I think it’s an extraordinary reflection of Calgary Opera’s special place in North American opera that a company that commissions and creates original opera is doing the exact same thing with kids.”

For Mr. Libman, the process begins with really talking to the students to see what’s important and relevant to them.  From there he works to get those issues and ideas into stories, which the kids write themselves.  It’s Mr. Libman’s role to boil those stories down to discover common threads and knit them together into an outline.  In every way it is the students’ creation.

“Parents are always surprised.  When it works, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever been involved with, and it’s completely addictive,” says Mr. Libman. “My goal is always the same.  You want the audience to be able to watch it even if they don’t have a kid in it.  That’s setting the bar pretty high. It’s something that opera patrons should actually try to get to; they would be amazed.”