Carmen and the Bull!

Erin Moll, Opera for All Teaching Artist

We had a very fun filled week at Opera For All! Not only have our students begun writing the scripts for their operas, but we also had guest performers from Chicago Opera Playhouse perform “Carmen & the Bull” for our students! The show “Carmen & the Bull” is a combination of the story “Ferdinand the Bull” with the music from Georges Bizet’s Carmen. The story follows a dancing, traveling gypsy as she befriends Ferdinand the Bull, his mother and a bullfighter! It explores the theme of bullying and teaches students to always be true to themselves!

In order to prepare them for the show, we listened to excerpts from Bizet’s Carmen and also did a Readers Theater of parts of the script. The students had fun acting out scenes from Carmen & the Bull and pretending to be the characters of Carmen, Ferdinand, his Mother, and Antonio the Bullfighter! 

The students had a lot of fun watching the show and participating! Over the last two months, OFA students have been working on music from Carmen & the Bull so they could participate in the show as the opera chorus! They learned two songs, the “Little Bulls Chorus” and the “Toreador Song.” I was impressed with how well the students learned these songs, picking up on very complicated rhythms in the Little Bulls Chorus. When it came to the performance, the students sang their hearts out! Overall, the show was a blast!