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CHAPTER 1 / INTRODUCTION
The section “Make your own opera” is aimed at students within and without the school setting, the educational community, and all those who like opera and the performing arts in general and would like to dare to create and stage their own performance. It is not a guide containing concrete steps or methodologies you need to follow to make your own show; “Make your own opera” is rather a source of inspiration, a section offering information that can surely be useful to you throughout the process, a section that aspires to make you feel creative without being preoccupied with whether or not you have the appropriate space, human resources or means. It is an educational tool that you can use for prearranged school celebrations – by implementing specific chapters of the provided material –, a big final presentation at the end of the school year, a performance you want to stage with your class, or even for your classes as part of the curriculum, starting from just one chapter. The stage that is hidden in your class is waiting for you to reveal it.
So make your own opera performance, and don’t get scared off by the title. Remember that opera constantly transforms and has a lot to teach you!
In this chapter we will explore ideas on how to create a text, be it an original one or a story you will make up together in the classroom, a story you’ve been told, a part of a text, a play, a short story, a poem, or even a newspaper clipping.
The text is usually the first thing to create in works of the performing arts (opera, music theatre, theatre, etc.). There are, of course, also exceptions, for example operas where the music was created first, followed by the text, or theatre performances that have no speech, no text at all. However, here, we will treat those cases where a text does exist, or where we will create it ourselves from scratch.
In opera, in particular, like you read in the chapter Voice types and professions in opera, the text is called a libretto. It contains dialogues, prose (that is, the ordinary unmetered form of language, as opposed to poetry) and poetry, which in combination with the music gives us the arias and all the sung parts of an opera. However, as classical forms and structures of all performing art genres have expanded and opened up over the years, let us try to unleash our imagination and create a story, a text, a performance of our own, without giving emphasis to particular genres or forms.
Let’s explore below some possible ways of creating our textual material:
- Writing an original text
- Using texts from school textbooks (literature, ancient Greek literature, history etc.)
- Selecting a timely topic or a historical event
CHAPTER 2 / POOL OF IDEAS
Whether you are in a group setting or a school classroom, you can choose the way you want to work, either collectively, or divided into sub-groups, or even individually, designating a member of the group or pupil for each specialty
Writing an original text
Find your story. Individually or in groups in the classroom, you can look for topics about which you want to discuss and stories through which you want to talk about these topics. Write down every idea, every thought that may come up from this quest. Think what kind of story you would like to tell and describe it, as a first draft of your concept. Moreover, search your memory for stories that you have been told by friends, acquaintances and family members. Perhaps some of these stories are interesting as a source of inspiration for your own story. Always keep in mind the main topic you want to talk about, as well as the message you would be interested in communicating through this work, regardless of the way you are going to tell it.
Do a research on the topic. When the idea, the story you want to tell becomes clearer in your mind, then it’s time you did some research on your topic. Search online, in books, ask people in your environment who may know things about your subject. Keep in mind that the better research you do, the closer you will come to your subject and the easier it will be for you to write your story.
Find your characters. When you come up with your initial concept, try to imagine the work’s roles, the characters you want to talk about through this story.
Build your story’s structure. At this point, you need to decide what the structure of your work will be and how many scenes you would like it to have. Your work may extend to as many scenes as you wish, depending of course on the time available. If you want something short, then you can make a one-act work; if you have a story that needs more time to develop, in your view, then you can add more acts/scenes.
The plot. At this point, having written down all of the above, you need to build your storyline. The beginning, the middle and the end, with all the events/episodes unfolding within the plot. In a few words, you need to create the flow of the story and decide:
- How it begins
- Where we are at and when
- How the story unfolds and evolves within the work’s timeframe
- How the story ends and what the fate of the characters by the end of the story is
The text. And at this point, the time has come to write the entire story, based on all of the above steps. Keeping the storyline, the structure and your characters, it’s time to bring your text to life, through the narration and descriptions of the story by the characters, dialogues, and also, if you wish so, poetry /verses that could help you combine the story with the music.
Using texts / excerpts from school textbooks
An alternative way to find a text for your performance is to use texts that already exist in school textbooks. You can look for passages from school textbooks of your grade or of previous or subsequent grades. In books of literature, ancient Greek literature, history, as well as of other subjects of the curriculum, you can find a large volume of texts that you could explore, study and choose from. Moreover, with the help of your teachers, you could even make a combination of selected texts, or texts and poems, slightly edited or unedited, that could become the textual material of your performance.
Selecting a topic / topical event
Another way of finding and creating textual material is to seek inspiration and sources from topical social and political events or events of the past. To begin, try to remember and discuss in class events that have been etched in memory and which you think it would be interesting to capture artistically. After selecting an event, use the internet to seek useful material/information. Newspapers, reportages, texts written about the specific event, videos, sound material, interviews and anything else you can find through this search. After examining and collecting all the material you will have found online, put it together with the goal of studying it. After studying it and having now a clear picture of the context in your head, try to create the storyline of a performance with the pieces of this textual material. Consider what parts of this material you would like to communicate through your performance, creating a collage of the texts you have collected. In this collage you can also add your own texts, comments, and songs, or use the collected material as is.
ACTIVITY 1 / TEXT
Introduction
In this activity, working in groups or individually or with the entire class, try to create a new story, following the steps below and using some basic building blocks for crafting stories.
Step 1
In this step you will search for the subject matter of your story. What is it you would like to talk about? What issues would you like to treat through your story? Would you like to tell a story about friendship, love, current societal concerns, a love story from the future or the past? Is it a story that happened to you, something you heard, or something that has just been born in your mind? In any case, you can start from a group discussion or an individual search, answering the following questions:
- What is the basic subject matter of the story?
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Step 2: The birth of our characters
Choosing and moulding the characters is one of the most important aspects of a story. You can choose as many characters as you like. There are shows with just one performer and others with a large cast. Based on the story you want to tell and having answered the questions in step 1, it’s now time to bring your heroes to life. If your story has one character, things are simple; in the event that your story has more characters, you should consider the following:
Every story has two kinds of characters:
Main characters
They are the protagonist(s) of you story and those characters who are directly connected to them. Think of how the roles that appear more often in your story could be.
Supporting characters
These are the characters who appear less often in the story and serve in a supporting capacity. They are, probably, linked to the main characters and will play some part in the plot, yet they remain in the background, compared to the protagonists.
After writing down your characters, make a plan that will outline how they appear in the story and what their personality is.
Step 3: The story’s plot & and the problem
Now, it’s the time for the plot! The plot is what motivates the characters to act, react against the challenges and problems they face, and, eventually, find a solution or not… So, start thinking about your story’s plot and write it down, that is, the order and the way in which events happen in your story, while keeping a structure with a beginning, a middle and an end. Indicatively, you can write down your story using a similar board, where you will divide the events into three time periods/acts.
Step 4: The scenes
After completing all of the above steps, you can move on to creating the work’s scenes. Think that the scenes are the subsections of the previous step’s 3 acts. By making use of the storyboard below, you can organise and write down the scenes of your story. In case the same group undertakes to direct the performance too, you can also draw some sketches, which will be useful to you during the text visualization process. This can actually work both ways: a draft visualization of the text through sketches can make it easier for you to develop your text.
After having completed all of the above steps, you now have a rich and structured material with which you can finalize your text. You are free to choose the form of the text. Would you like it to be in a narrative form? Would you like it to be the monologue of a protagonist telling a story? Would you like your story to have only dialogues or a combination of all of the above?
ACTIVITY 2 / TEXT
Using an excerpt from Greek author Menis Koumandareas’ short story Employment Office (Γραφείον ευρέσεως εργασίας) [Texts of Modern Greek Literature (Second Grade of Junior High School)], let’s try to make up a dialogue for the story’s hero.
The next day he woke up, light as a feather. He washed up, got dressed, grabbed a slice of buttered bread and wandered off through the streets. He walked holding his head up high, smiled at the baker who greeted him with a good morning, and sent a friendly greeting to his barber – he would soon again be his customer. He walked a lot, until he reached the avenue. Τhere, the trees were turning green, trimmed and planted in orderly rows in the pavement, holding each other’s arm, like lined-up pupils in gym class. He was happy to see that there was no garbage trapped in the corners of the street. In his mind, he saw garbage collectors as angels splashing the country’s face with fresh irrigation water. Daylight was crystal clear, as if it had been changed today. It slid across the cheek of the street like a sharpened razorblade. Large cars, with well-polished fenders and preserved sheet metals, were rolling on the asphalt without hurting it. And the traffic policeman in the middle of the street with his collared uniform and shining helmet, seemed as if he was catching the cars from an invisible thread. Even girls looked different today, as if they had awaken from the sleep of death that had covered them with new faces. Boys were dressed to the nines and had an air of self-confidence. Others were carrying their school bags, and others their gear; workers – their snack wrapped in a kitchen towel. Even old men had a way of looking at him, as if they could still remember that they too were once young. […]
After reading the excerpt carefully, imagine that, as the story moves forward, the protagonist approaches one of the elderly men looking at him and starts a conversation with him. He wants to find out why they are looking at him like that. The protagonist comes close to him and starts a dialogue with him.
Protagonist: Good afternoon!
Elderly man: Good afternoon, son!
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Continue this dialogue!
VIDEO
While exploring the above ideas, suggestions and steps, feel free to experiment with creating your own text/libretto. To get more ideas, watch the following video, where Dimitris Dimopoulos shares with you relevant information as well as his experience as a librettist for music theatre works.
Dimitris Dimopoulos discusses the significance of the text and gives advices to young librettists. Video produced by Odd Bleat.
