Once Upon A Time at Opera for All...

Matt McNabb, Opera for All Teaching Artist

Picture it: Hundreds of students visiting the Chicago History Museum, walking around with a scavenger hunt worksheet, finding out new and fascinating facts about the people and places of our great city of Chicago. There’s a buzz of excitement as the students accomplish the goal of filling out their worksheets and choosing their favorite characters and settings of Chicago history.

Now move forward a couple weeks to the classrooms. The teachers walk in anticipating great things from their students. And let me tell you, we were not disappointed. We just completed one of my favorite sections of our Opera For All curriculum-Story Creation! The students took their knowledge gained from their field trip, and collaboratively with the classroom teachers and teaching artists created the stories that will become the scripts for each of the class operas. The students picked their favorite historical characters (including important character traits), Chicago settings and also crafted a plot, including story elements of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and themes.

I continue to be impressed by the creativity and ingenuity I see from the students. Each of the 11 opera plots we helped create with the students are different and original, and watching them organically unfold in the space of two class sessions is truly something to behold.

I anticipate that our audiences this year will experience greater depth of emotions, more subtle storytelling and a wider breadth of characters and settings than they have ever experienced before. These past two weeks have turned out to be more gratifying than I could have imagined, and I thank the students, my fellow teaching artists, the Chicago Opera Theatre team and all the staff at our fabulous schools for cultivating such an amazing atmosphere of creativity and exploration this year! As we take our newly created unique stories and craft our scripts and songs and dances, I can promise that this year is full of adventure and promise. And I can’t wait to share these stories!