Arts education is more than an enrichment activity, it is a powerful tool that shapes how students think, feel, and connect with the world. Boulder Opera offers two opera outreach classroom programs that allow us to bring opera to students in the fall and spring semesters. In the fall we invite students to the student matinee performances of our Family Series and bring a bilingual opera education workshop to classrooms to prepare them for the field trip to the student matinee. This year we reached over 250 students with our workshops and performances of Gaetano Donizetti’s Elixir of Love. Over half of those reached were students from Title 1 schools in Boulder county.
In the spring, we offer a travelling opera production. For this program, we bring an opera production to each individual school. For the past couple of years, we have been touring our bilingual Spanish-English production of Chris Praetorius Gómez’s opera Xochitl and the Flowers. Along with the opera performance, students also participate in a bilingual workshop where they learn the story of the opera and make colorful paper flowers that will be used on stage by our touring artists during the performance. Over the past two years we have reached over 4000 students across Boulder, Adams and Denver counties, including many students at Title 1 schools, with our touring program.
I have been fortunate to lead many of these workshops and the joy and creativity in the classrooms is palpable. Cognitively, students engaged with opera encounter complex storytelling, multilingual text, and layered musical structures that challenge the brain in unique ways. Emotionally, opera gives students new ways to understand and express their experiences. One of my favorite memories from the last three years took place this fall at a storytelling workshop around the story of Elixir of Love. At the end of our workshop, students presented their stories in both Spanish and English. The stories created were very inventive, but what was even more moving was the collaboration and laughter that the groups shared. It was a wonderful moment where opera cultivated community through co-creation, imagination, and play!