Create-an-Opera is a collaborative project bringing together young people from The Alsama Project in Beruit and Buckinghamshire’s Cressex Community School and Highcrest Academy.Over the course of five days, participants visited Garsington Studios both in person and virtually to devise and create their own original opera. Students from Cressex and Highcrest connected online with students from the Alsama Project to explore the questions ‘What is happiness?’.
Through their conversations, they asked themselves what made them happy, and discovered not only how their experiences shaped different responses but were able to share how much they had in common. One student from Highcrest explained that ‘because (the Alasma students) circumstances are very different from ours it was surreal to be able to speak to them and find out what their life is compared to our lives’
The aim of the project was to collaborate across culture and communities, bridging the distance from Beirut to Buckinghamshire, and to create a shared artistic response to a simple question with a complex response: ‘Can you choose to be happy?’
Dance students from Highcrest and Cressex worked with a choreographer at Garsington Studios to develop movements inspired by lyrics written by their peers. Meanwhile, other students collaborated to craft those lyrics and set them to music, working with composer Richard Taylor.
A group of students from Highcrest and Cressex reflected on the project and if their perspective on happiness had changed during the project, with student saying ‘It’s really nice to know that other people can be happy in different ways’. Reflecting on meeting Alsama students online, another student said, “its obviously harder for other people in different countries when there is a war going on so maybe we open our eyes to how their experiences really shaped them.”
The result of this project stands as a powerful testament to creativity, collaboration and the enduring possibility of joy even in the most unexpected places.
