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 will be participating in Make Your Own Radio Show school residencies in Worcester, Cambridge and Boston.

Opera Boston continues to develop programs for Boston area after-school programs. In conjunction with Boston After School and Beyond, Young Audiences, and the Wallace Foundation, Opera Boston artists participate in the Partners for Student Success (PSS) initiative. PSS is a multi-year program that aims to more tightly align in-school, out-of-school and community resources to ensure that struggling students get the support they need to succeed. Additional Opera Boston after-school programs have taken place at the Community Music Center in the South End, the Boys and Girls Club in Charlestown, the East Boston YMCA and the 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.

This past 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 has been performed at Cloud Place and the Ahts Festival in Columbus Park, Boston. Planning has begun for Opera Factory 2009.

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.