"Citius, altius, fortius" (swifter, higher, stronger), the words that John Williams set to music for the 2002 Olympic theme, describe not only the athletic component of the Games but also the spirit behind the artistic component.
In its effort to reach new heights in the arts, the Cultural Olympiad has joined forces with the Kennedy Center Imagination Celebration to commission an opera ? "Dreaming Blue" ? by noted composer Libby Larsen. One of America's most prolific composers, Larsen chose to take the subject of the opera, and much of the libretto, from fourth-grade children at Mountain View Elementary School.
In preparation, Larsen came to Salt Lake City last year and spent a couple of days working with the children at Mountain View. "She had no preconception of what she wanted to do with it," said Utah Opera chorus-master Douglas Kinney-Frost, "other than she knew she wanted to try to find some group consensus from kids that there were issues important to them, and let them create an opera from it."
Through various exercises, Larsen explored how the children saw the world and how they saw themselves through the abstraction of color. "I wanted to see how the children might be involved, what they were thinking, how they were feeling," Larsen said. "(I wanted) to begin to understand what could come from the energy of the children, which is really the best of all possible worlds for creating a piece."
The result? Larsen said she kept seeing the issue of isolation coming up again and again. "This is a school where practically every nationality is represented, and so there were a lot of feelings about kids of different skin colors not fitting in with a very Caucasian society.
"We had children who had come together in a school setting who didn't necessarily have a common verbal language. Some were just learning English, some spoke English at school but not at home. (Many) children were learning to express their sense of safety and their sense of self through the color."
In keeping with the children's responses, the plot of "Dreaming Blue" centers around the issues of identity, isolation and color. The central figure is a child, who is trying to find out who he is by trying to find out what color he is.
The child is accompanied by a character called the "Voice of Child," which interacts with three other characters, each a physical representation of different aspects of the child's imagination. The first, Baby Blue, represents pure creativity. Blue Weirdo is a cool, machismo, tough character, and Azul (the name comes from the Spanish word for "blue") is the peacemaker, the calming influence.
The child will be played by a student from Mountain View Elementary, and the other four roles will be sung by professional opera singers. The Opus Chamber Orchestra, under the direction of Kinney-Frost will accompany. "It's very abstract," said Kinney-Frost, "but the score is very moving, and it does ask the question, 'What happens when kids get isolated and what happens when kids feel alone?'
"(It's) ultimately about the journey this child takes to figure out, through the idea of color, what he wants to be, what he is, and who he is. By figuring out who he is, he is more able to fit in with the other kids in his environment."
Although the on-stage characters will be mostly played by adults, Larsen said that the opera always involves the children somehow. For example, the scenery, created by Elaine Harding, was inspired from drawings by the children, and through video projections translates all of the concepts to a visual language.
The libretto was taken from words written by the children themselves. Larsen said that reading through the children's responses, she found "incredible and profound" poetic lines "that would have taken a professional poet quite a long time to find the words to put into print.
"I was really enormously humbled by the children's generosity, by their direct honesty and by the fact that they are the future and they are teaching us at every turn. They make very good listeners and very good stewards of the community and (through them), we really can make a better world," she said.
The premiere (and only scheduled performance) of "Dreaming Blue" will be presented on Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m., in the Rose Wagner Theater. Tickets may be purchased at any ArtTix location, online at www.arttix.org, or by calling 581-7100.
E-mail: rcline@desnews.com