We asked Elliott, our workshop leader for the St John Bosco College Parallel Production to give us an idea of what the groups are getting up to….
St Marks Primary School Workshop
In the beginning was the word, and the word was FUN! Toward the tail end of 2018, I was lucky enough to lead taster workshops for both our prospective primary and secondary school cohorts. The plan, to take Baseless Fabric’s modernised version of the classic, ‘Die Fledermaus’ and go wild with it; adding characters and scenes or doing them in new and different ways, learning to sing with correct operatic technique, acting, song and script writing and of course we play games! As you can imagine the reception was fantastic and our taster sessions were so much fun, we had scenes set anywhere from a hilarious family dinner, just after Eisenstein had gotten in trouble with the police, to a party at the top of a mountain and a marriage counselling session between Eisenstein and Rosalinde on the moon.
Cranmer Primary School Parallel Production Session
I left both sessions excited about the future of this project and guiding these creative young minds along the adventure of creating their own opera. Fast forward to now, we are 2 sessions in and we are having a great time. When asked what they were enjoying most so far, Amalie “The humour and acting!”, Whoopie “Acting and singing!”, Akari “Making my own lines!”, Abigail “Acting, seeing what the others create and I love singing!”. The fun and creativity has been translated well into hard work, laughter and some fantastic scenes, I won’t give too much away, but suffice to say they are working hard and enthusiastically, supporting each other well and embracing something totally new… These operas are going to be special!
