Residencies & Collaborations

School Groups

The inaugural effort of Opera Boston's education program took place in 2002 at the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Somerville. During a four-month period, Opera Boston artists worked with the school’s faculty to bring the excitement of opera to 90 fifth- and sixth-graders. The program resulted in three performances of an original opera that was written by the students and principal with the help of Opera Boston’s artistic staff. The opera, called Live and Learn, explored the theme of bullying. This residency set the tone for Opera Boston’s education program; the program is committed to helping students express themselves and teaching them to engage with performance as a participant or as an active listener. The example of Live and Learn has guided and informed much of Opera Boston’s subsequent work in education and outreach.

More recently, in collaboration with NPR's From the Top and Young Audiences, Opera Boston artists directed a "Make Your Own Radio Show" residency for a fifth-grade class at the bilingual Hurley School in Boston's South End. Students created a radio presentation about biodiversity and environmentalism that was recorded by WGBH. During the 2007-08 season, Opera Boston participated in Make Your Own Radio Show school residencies in Worcester, Cambridge and Boston.

Opera Boston has been selected to participate in the Boston Public School Arts Expansion Initiative during the 2009 -2010 school year.   During the year long residency, company artists will collaborate with Music and Theater staff at the Edison Middle School to expand the school’s Integrated Performing Arts program to include instruction in Theater Design.

Additionally, Opera Boston has held after-school programs at the Community Music Center in the South End, the Boys and Girls Club in Charlestown, the East Boston YMCA, and United South End Settlement House.

Enrichment Partners

During Opera Boston’s 2007 production of Ainadamar, the scenic designer, Gronk – a Los Angeles based muralist, performance and video artist – worked with Boston teenagers who participate as Teen Curators in Visual, Spoken Word, and Video Art at the Cloud Foundation in Boston’s Back Bay. Gronk and the Teen Curators created four collaborative abstract canvases that reflect “the different dynamics, emotions, and moods of the group during each session,” in the words of one participant.

Last summer, Opera Boston and the Cloud Foundation expanded their collaboration with a new four week intensive opera workshop for teens called The Opera Factory. From mid-July to mid-August, teens from the Boston area designed, constructed, and performed a new operatic presentation inspired by Bizet’s Carmen. The show was performed at Cloud Place and the Ahts Festival in Columbus Park, Boston.

Opera Factory 2009 has been expanded to five weeks, during which time Gronk will join the artistic staff to work with the teens on scenic design.  This year’s production will be based on Mozart’s comic masterpiece Cosi fan Tutte.

Arts Therapy

Opera Boston artists presented workshops for chronically ill and disabled adult patients at Tewksbury Hospital and for homeless adults at Boston’s St. Francis House and Pine Street Inn. The program, presented in April 2007, was conducted in collaboration with the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Streetwise Opera Theatre of London, and the Healing Arts Initiative of the Vermont Arts Exchange. This partnership continued in April 2008 with a twelve-week residency at Tewksbury Hospital, which resulted in a musical and dramatic production inspired by Ainadamar with hands-on performance opportunities for Tewksbury Hospital patients, expressive therapy staff and local high school students. The show was presented at Tewksbury Hospital for the hospital’s patients and staff, local school children and the community at large.

Opera Boston’s Healing Arts Program continued this year with an initiative at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.  The two month, four hour per week pilot program was implemented by Lesley University Music Therapy faculty member Lisa Kynvi with assistance from graduate intern Kerry Leavell.  Using vocal and instrumental music, Ms. Kynvi and Leavell helped the patients to manage pain, reduce anxiety, decrease respiratory distress, increase coping skills, and provide outlets for emotional expression.  The program proved so valuable that Lesley University has agreed to continue and expand it, and will use it as a training site for their graduate Music Therapy students.  Beginning in September, the program will be expanded to twenty hours per week.