Opera & Hockey: Parallel Worlds?

As we head into game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final (GO BRUINS!) we asked our Twitter followers to tell us what it's like being an opera lover and a sports fanatic: 

@abbottjones says: " Both get my heart rate up. I cheer at both: "Bravo" or "War Eagle" or "Go Sox!" Both make life more exciting. #operafan #sportsfan. "

@baritoneirvin says: " Some might argue that opera IS a sport. I know I feel that way after some shows. :-) " 

Baritone Matthew Worth (@worthmatthew), recently seen as Guglielmo in BLO's production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, reflected on what it's like to be an opera singer and a (sometimes) athlete:

I was yelling at the opposing team's player with my soft palette raised high, producing a supported, vibrating {o} vowel.  I wasn't alone--my brother and I were seated behind one of the hoops for an important pair of free throws and our whole section was yelling in chorus to distract the player from the task at hand.  My brother wasn't fully committed to tripping up the guy at the line, though.  He couldn't stop laughing at my foreign sound and me, the opera singer with a sports problem.

There was a time when I was playing sports more often than I was performing on the stage.  These days, it's certainly reversed--I only occasionally play pickup basketball, flag football or a round of golf whereas my livelihood is made as an opera singer.  Every day, however, I'm able to draw similarities between the two mediums.  Both athletes and singers are entertainers, required to be focused in every moment on the stage.  We visualize success before it happens, having prepared countless hours on our own in practice rooms and on empty courts.  

There are less-obvious parallels to be drawn as well.  If I were to break down singing into very basic principles, it would go something like this: Intake of breath, onset of support, onset of sound, release of sound, release of support.  Every major athletic motion has an equivalent. In taking a free throw, I breathe while bending my knees, then extend through the shot while exhaling into the follow through.  My golf swing (when it's working) begins with a breath in the backswing, exhaling through contact into follow through.  I've never been a hockey player, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that every player on the ice in this Bruins/Blackhawks series has a similar progression in their wrister across the ice or slap shot. 

Make way for the Bruins!

Click here to read about our friendly wager with the Lyric Opera of Chicago. 
It's been a blast battling it out on Twitter with @LyricOpera. Follow us @BostLyricOpera to join in the fun and help us win our Re-Tweet Challenge!

Show Us Your Pride

Have you ever heard the old joke, “I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out”? Even if you have, you’ve never heard, “I went to the Stanley Cup finals and an opera broke out.” BLO wants to do something about that, and so we are challenging the Lyric Opera of Chicago to a friendly bet.

Think about it: Opera has all the spectacle and drama of a sporting event. Three acts.  Triple overtime. Need we say more?

In some ways, opera has it over sports. At a hockey game, you can hear music and singing only at the beginning (unless it’s a win at the Garden and then you get Dirty Water at the end).  

And this year is the first time in decades that two teams from the original six NHL teams are facing off in the season finale. We’ve got the traditions and history too. BLO and Lyric Opera of Chicago have almost a century of opera drama under their collective belt.

Boston and Chicago take pride in their world-class cultural organizations and in their championship franchises. We’ve got great museums, orchestras and opera companies. We’ve got major league soccer, basketball, football and baseball teams.

But it’s been almost 30 years since the Patriots and the Bears met in Super Bowl XX. And in spite of Theo Epstein’s move from our city to yours, it doesn’t look like the Red Sox and the Cubs will face each other in this year’s World Series. So the time is now.

BLO and Lyric Opera of Chicago are two teams at the top of their game.  

How about it Lyric, are you ready to take to the ice? 

Follow @BostLyricOpera and show us your @NHLBruins pride! Re-tweet for a chance to win dinner at a local restaurant + 2 tix to #MagicFlute. Can we beat @LyricOpera's RTs?? #OperaBruins #CHIvsBOS

Making New Discoveries: Grade School Children Learn About Opera

On Friday, May 31, I had the great pleasure of attending my second Festival of Classroom Operas in partnership with Wheelock Family Theatre as the Director of Community Engagement at BLO.  This festival is the culminating, celebratory event for the Music! Words! Opera! program where classrooms that have progressed to creating their own original operas are able to come together and share their work.  

Nine classrooms participated in the program this year, and though we didn’t see everyone at the festival, we celebrated many successes  for educators who have been teaching their students about classic operas and seeing young faces (and in some cases, hearing nervous giggles) as students listened to famous arias and chorus numbers for the very first time.  Students have attended BLO rehearsals, welcomed BLO Artists into their classrooms, and in the swell of all these new sounds, unfamiliar languages, colorful costumes, and long-gone composers, they set upon the daunting task of writing their own opera. The question “Well, where in the world do I begin?” immediately comes to mind, doesn’t it?

Festival participants took part in theatre workshops led by BLO and WFT Teaching Artists and demonstrated their operas onstage to an audience of their peers.  All very fun, and very entertaining.   

My favorite part of the day was the conversation that took place among the students after they finished performing their operas.  Led by WFT’s Director of Education, I was impressed by the way children in grades 2 – 5 articulated their observations about their experience.  

Some of the topics:

* Facing stage fright                             

* Negotiating uncooperative props and set pieces

* Unexpected audience reaction

* Problem-solving and improvising together

* (And my favorite) Struggling with the sometimes confounding problem of playing a character while still being just a normal, living, breathing person standing on a stage.  This can be quite the uncomfortable problem for the soldier onstage being played by a ten-year-old with an itchy nose! 

As I reflect on the festival and seeing these discoveries unfold, I find that I am most in awe of the process that preceded the demonstrations, and as the school year ends, what more could still be done for which there is, sadly, no time left. It’s the process that is important. In the past two seasons I have seen classroom story ideas generate from many different sources: learning about immigration in social studies lessons, a language arts folktale writing assignment, an inspiring or fun song from music class, an adaptation of a classic myth, even an historical dance—the list goes on and on. As I think about this idea, I am thrilled to know that children are discovering that there are stories everywhere and they are worth telling.

Though it gets more challenging, because in the performing arts, we don’t just tell stories—we show them.  And in opera, we also sing them!  From concept and writing, melody and score, character choices, movement and dance, breath and projection, costumes, sets, and props (whew!),  there is no way for one 15-minute performance to convey all the real successes of these students.

So how do you measure success?  By seeing a theatre full of young children thinking and talking like artists.  When you’re thinking like an artist, you’re thinking like a team member, a problem-solver, and a storyteller.  Like someone without ego, but confident.  Like someone with more questions than answers, always making new discoveries.

Megan Cooper

Director of Community Engagement 

Photos courtesy of Ben Gebo Photography

Reflections on CLEMENCY & the AFH Youth Artists

The 2012/13 season Opera Annex production of James MacMillan’s Clemency took place at the Artists for Humanity (AFH) Epicenter in February.  For twenty years, AFH has been empowering and employing Boston teens in a uniquely intensive program of arts, creativity and enterprise. AFH partners youth in small groups with professional artists/designers to design, create, market and sell art products. 

In preparation for the production, Clemency scenic designer, Julia Noulin-Mérat, worked with AFH youth artists in the 3-D design studio in a series of workshops during which participants read the libretto of the opera, completed research and design sketches, built scale set-models of their own design, and presented their work to Julia and the Clemency Stage Director, Andrew Eggart before seeing BLO’s own design for the opera.  AFH youth artists also attended special events with the composer and librettist, visited the A.R.T. Scene Shop to observe the set build, and attended the Final Dress Rehearsal and performances of Clemency.  Recently, Julia reflected back on her experience leading the project at AFH.   

BLO: Normally, working as a scenic designer and artist, what do you find intriguing or inspiring about working with teens?

Julia: I think they come into it with no preconceptions, and with a very open mind—an uncensored mind.  And their curiosity is different.

How is it different?

What they latch onto.  Sometimes it’s very impulsive, and sometimes it has to do with what is relevant to them – having gone through [an experience] or something they’ve heard about and they want to explore that more.  The typical approach is that you start thinking dramaturgically about the context of the story. 

Describe the kind of energy that young, developing artists bring to this kind of project?  How do you respond to it as an artist yourself, and as someone being given a mentorship role to young people?

My answer to that question would have been completely different ten years ago, in the sense that social media has completely changed human interactions.  [Teens] are growing up in a world where they’re constantly attached to their phones.  So, to ask them to focus on something is completely different.  You really have to engage with them.

Does that make your job harder?

Not harder, but you have to constantly ask them questions, and be proactive.  When I was doing things like this ten years ago we had more time to process things.  Now, you have to be ready to constantly draw things out of the students.

Why is it important to expose young people to scenic design and technical theatre?

It gives them a better comprehension of what happens behind the scenes.  And I think it really covers the basics of multiple subjects.  You start with the text—basic English and literature skills.  Then there’s the mathematical aspect of how you are going to fit everything [in the scenic design] onstage, basic problem-solving.  Then there’s the art history and appreciation – depending on the approach you take.    It’s really exciting for young people to know that there are jobs out there that do require knowledge in a little bit of everything, and that change every day.  I remember myself, I had no idea this job existed.  [Laughs.]  It’s good to know that there are other kinds of artists.  Usually, people hear “artist” and they think you’re a painter or a sculptor.  But art can be so many different things.  

Did you have any experiences as a teen that inspired you to get involved in set design?

It’s actually kind of funny—I was in pre-Med [laughs] and one of my friends said, “Julia, you’re seeing plays two to three times per week.  Don’t you think there’s something to that?”  And I was like, “Oh, no, no, this is just a fun little hobby.”  But I started interning [with a set designer], and I just fell in love with it.  And I sat my parents down and said I thought I would try set design.  And they were very supportive, luckily.

That’s great you had such supportive parents.

My mom, when I was a kid, did something very smart.  She took me to see Bluebeard’s Castle, the play, and then I saw Bluebeard’s Castle, the opera.  It was cool to see the different cross-cultural aspects between the mediums.  

What was your favorite experience from working with the young artists at AFH?

The fact that they’re already coming from an environment in which they’re really excited about the arts, and they’re already pre-disposed and open-minded to experience something new.  And at AFH they’re so used to doing all these art installations for other clients, so they’re coming in with all these tools already, which is great!

Any final thoughts about the program at AFH?

I think the exciting thing about this project was that we embraced their space.  Instead of creating a theatre inside their space, it was more of an art installation than a set—a different interpretation of design.  And they got to see the whole puzzle of singers rehearsing, the acoustic challenges.  It’s really cool for them.  It would be one thing to go talk to them and then show up at the Shubert, which is cool too, but at AFH they could literally peek downstairs and see the process.

Second Annual Festival of Classroom Operas

This Friday, Boston Lyric Opera hosts its second Music! Words! Opera! Festival of Classroom Operas at Wheelock Family Theatre. In this culminating, celebratory event, classrooms join theatre workshops, share their opera knowledge, and demonstrate selections from their original classroom operas.

So what is Music! Words! Opera! exactly? This interactive, multi-disciplinary curriculum from OPERA America is currently BLO’s principal youth program. It is designed by a team of opera professionals, composers, curriculum specialists and classroom teachers to bring opera right into school classrooms. 

The curriculum has two components: first, students are introduced to the world of opera, learning its language, history and structure while studying opera and music-theater masterpieces. For the second half of the curriculum, students work with their teachers and BLO teaching artists to create a libretto and music to produce and perform their very own opera. M!W!O! reflects the highly interdisciplinary nature of opera as it uses the art form to aid students and teachers in their explorations of history, language, literature and music. Furthermore, with the Create Your Own component, M!W!O! also encourages students to find new creative means of self-expression.

During the summer, BLO offers a free one-week-long Teacher Training Workshop (PDP’s available) to any educator who is interested in bringing the arts into their classrooms. The workshop is led by skilled facilitators from OPERA America who provide all the tools and resources educators need, not only to teach students about opera, but also to guide them through the creative process of writing an original music-theater work. While learning invaluable classroom arts education skills and earning professional development points, teachers also create and perform their own original opera at the end of the summer workshop.

Classrooms participating in M!W!O! also receive many other opera enrichment opportunities with BLO. This past year, participating classrooms were invited to visit a rehearsal of BLO productions of Madama Butterfly and The Flying Dutchman. Nearly 250 students came to the Shubert Theatre and experienced a full-length professional opera production.

In the spring, BLO also arranges Classroom Visits by teaching artists for participating classrooms. During these visits, a BLO singer and pianist demonstrate live opera performances but also talk about their personal experience, sharing the details of life as a performer of opera. Students also have the opportunity to share their works-in-progress and receive professional feedback as they prepare to perform their own original works at the M!W!O! Festival in May.

As BLO wraps up the year with the M!W!O! Festival as its grand finale, it is also preparing to greet new teachers and participants for the 2013/14 season. Registration for the free summer workshop is now open! (Click HERE to register) You can also watch and listen for more about this exciting opportunity by viewing these videos: Introduction to M!W!O! and Teacher's Workshop Performance.