Tuning a new generation: opera companies work hard to make opera fun for kids -- all part of the serious job of building a new audience.

IN THE FACE OF GRAYING AUDI-ences, opera companies are increasingly turning their attention to arts education for young people in an all-out effort to develop the fans of the future. Vancouver Opera and the Canadian Opera Company have been touring productions to schools for decades, but this time-honored tradition is no longer considered aggressive enough to turn students into opera devotees. A one-hour performance of Hansel and Gretel serves merely as an introduction to the art form; these days, setting up hands-on, interactive situations for kids is seen to be the key to garnering audiences over the long term.

Many Canadian companies are now hiring education directors to create imaginative programs that move young people beyond the passive experience of watching a performance and into the role of active participants. The Grade 6 students of Don Mills Public School, for instance, who participated in the COC's Create an Opera program, not only helped to write the libretto and compose the music for their opus, Being Eleven, they also designed the sets and costumes and took part in every aspect of the performance. Says Elaine Calder, the COC's general manager: "Making the arts part of your life is a personal choice. Reaching students directly and getting them excited about the arts is a way of influencing that choice... We want kids to literally grow up with opera."

The COC has been a leader in this regard. Its Adopt-a-School program brings downtown children into contact with opera over an extended period of time as part of their normal curriculum. As well, the company, along with other Toronto arts organizations, is part of the Ontario Arts Education Institute, which provides teachers with resource material on how the arts can be a tool for what's called theme-based integrated learning. In other words, rather than treating the four basic areas of language, math, science and technology as isolated subjects, they are integrated into a thematic whole. Opera is ideal for this kind of approach to education. In addition to teaching students music and writing, mathematics and science can also be incorporated into, say, the drafting and building of set models to scale, or students can conduct simple experiments to explain the mechanics behind the human voice.

The idea behind the OAEI has been picked up by other companies like Opera Hamilton, which recently joined forces with its own local arts groups. The OH program, which is tied into an opera being performed in the current season, is aimed at Grades 4 and 5. "Professionals provide the tools and the expertise," says Peter Oleskevich, OH's education director. "Theatre Aquarius demonstrated how to build sets and props and make costumes, while the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the McMaster Museum of Art dealt with design and lighting."

It was Buchanan Park School that provided the initial inspiration for the Hamilton opera project. After attending a dress rehearsal of La Boheme last season, the students put on their own version of the opera called La Petite Boheme. The idea spread, and this season, each participating school wrote and performed its own version of The Magic Flute, as well as seeing OH's production. Students were introduced to the opera's story line and music in their classrooms; they then drafted their own scenario in their own words, based on the original story, as well as writing English lyrics to the arias or even composing their own music. To expand the possibility of work inside the classroom, a user-friendly guide helps the teacher build on the idea of integrated disciplines.

Study guides are, in fact, one of the staples of opera education programs, which are usually performance-based and often include discounted tickets for dress rehearsals and events such as workshops for teachers, per-performance talks, backstage tours and in-school visits by opera professionals. It's a useful and relatively inexpensive way to introduce the idea of opera into children's lives. Only large and comparatively wealthy companies like the COC or Vancouver Opera can afford to mount annual school tours of staged operas. The COC puts aside $362,000, or 2.6 per cent of its total annual budget of $13.5-million. Pacific Opera Victoria, being a far smaller company, allots between $18,000 and $19,000 or 1.5 per cent of its total $1.2-million budget.

While these outreach efforts are important in terms of exposing students to opera, the COC's education officer, Andrea Vagianos, believes that interactive programs, designed to get children directly involved in the process of making opera, are the way of the future for audience development. "You have to get kids to internalize opera," she says, "to take ownership of the art form, to make opera a personal experience."

To that end, the COC's Create an Opera program sends a dramaturge and a composer into selected classrooms for a six-week residency. In the 1995 project, five classes from Grades 6 to 11, each from a different Greater Toronto Area board of education, worked with professional artists to shape the libretto and compose the music. The students then gathered for an evening performance where they saw each other's operas.

One team consisted of composer Timothy Sullivan and dramaturge Aggie Carr. "I wrote the initial scenario," explains Sullivan, "and the students rewrote sections in their words and changed plot elements and characters. We then talked about the score in concrete terms, such as the students wanting `chase music' or `suspense music,' and from this we created soundscapes, songs and interludes, some of it composed by the students themselves."

The COC also mounted a project called the Community Opera. In this case, Scarborough's Samuel Hearne Senior Public School and two community centres were involved, under the leadership of dramaturge/director John Van Burek, composer/conductor Leslie Arden and the design experts of Shadowland Theatre.

The 250 students at the school speak 32 different languages so, not surprisingly, ethnic differences and racism were chosen as the focus of their libretto. Initially, a group made up of students from all the classes researched the theme that would best reflect the interests of their area. They hammered it into a scenario under Van Burek's guidance and then each of the Grade 7 and 8 classes wrote one scene. Arden set their lyrics to music, while each class designed the scene they'd written. The adults from the community centres wrote and performed their own parts, and lent a hand with set design and building, while student teachers from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education helped in the music preparation and played in the orchestra.

In a school where there had never been a vocal music program, 120 students auditioned for the opera. Says Vagianos: "In both projects, the kids got to manipulate words in relation to music, which gave them an inside look at the structure of opera--a tremendous way to demystify the art form. They were also introduced to aspects of opera like music arrangement and the role of the orchestra, and how scene changes work--things that they would never get to know by just attending performances."

As if all that community work weren't enough, last summer the COC was also involved in an all-day, two-week summer camp sponsored by Altamira Investment Services, in which children took classes in drama, dance, music and design using Hansel and Gretel as a theme. As evidence of the camp's success, when the 40 students and their families were offered free tickets to either La Cenerentola or Rigoletto, most of them jumped at the chance.

Obviously, personalizing opera is the key to audience development. Vancouver Opera's education manager, Peggy Jameson, agrees. "My target is teenagers," she says. "I want them to get caught up in the whole theatricality and emotionalism of opera, and cry when Mimi dies in La Boheme. If they fall in love with opera, they'll be back." VO's flagship interactive program, Opera Experience, is a fourpart project aimed at secondary students. It includes in-school visits to introduce the art form via a singer and pianist, a visit to VO the week before opening to become acquainted with the behind-the-scenes of a production, attending a VO production and a follow-up in the classroom to exchange reviews and share the experience. An adjunct program, Career Preparation, allows five to 10 senior students to "shadow" a professional, from run-through to dress rehearsal.

At L'Opera de Montreal, performance-based and interactive activities for students are combined in the company's show-and-tell School Matinee/Matinee des ecoles, organized by the Opera Guild under Renee Rouleau with the support of Chantal Lambert, who heads OM's Atelier program for young professionals.

One opera per season is designated as a school matinee. Lambert then creates a bilingual, hour-long show in which Atelier members take students through the story, by singing arias and ensembles to a piano accompaniment, and the kids get to take a look at the backstage mechanics. The Guild creates a bilingual background guide that is sent out to teachers in advance.

Some companies with limited means can be very resourceful in mounting education programs. Pacific Opera Victoria, for example, works jointly with the University of Victoria to create an internship for a music education student to give in-school background lectures for its productions. General manager Jeffrey Ouellette reports that the company is also looking into an interactive program for pre-schoolers, along the lines of Mr. Rogers or Mr. Dressup, that teaches the basic elements of opera, perhaps in conjunction with puppeteers or a children's theatre group.

There are, of course, individuals outside opera companies who are equally committed to making classical music more approachable for children. Susan Hammond, who founded the Toronto-based recording company Classical Kids, is probably as responsible as anyone for turning young people on to classical music with recordings such as Mozart's Magic Fantasy (based on The Magic Flute) and Beethoven Lives Upstairs. Hammond had the idea of combining a child-centred story with the facts of a great composer's life, thus giving young people an entree to the music. It's a notion that has worked extremely well. "You know you're a success," says Hammond, "when kids sing the Queen of the Night's aria in the shower."

In an inspired collaboration, Toronto's Opera Atelier was asked to stage Magic Fantasy using the lavish sets and costumes from the company's own baroque production. Hammond believes that "opera has potential for children because they're naturally dramatic." OA's co-artistic director, Jeannette Zingg, adds, "Baroque opera is esoteric, yet because children are so open, they accept the piece for what it is. And when they get older, because Magic Fantasy has relevance for them, baroque opera won't seem such a strange concept."

There are always some children, of course, for whom the idea of singing on stage holds no mystery. The 75 young members of the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus are undoubtedly among that happy band. They are not only part of the opera audience of the future but are audience-builders themselves. Founded in 1968, the Toronto-based, award-winning CCOC attracts 11- to 16-year-olds who want to perform as much as sing. Music director John Tuttle says, "Kids audition because of the dramatic component--they want to be on stage. They're also the audience of tomorrow because they come to know the complexities of opera by actually performing it."

The CCOC provides child singers for COC productions and gives choral concerts, but its main focus is putting on an annual opera. As general manager Ann Hartford Marshall points out: "To accommodate the crush of eight- to 11-year-olds clamoring to get in, we've created two apprentice choruses. Nothing piques the interest of a child like another child having fun."

Despite what appears to be a hive of activity surrounding children's involvement in opera, interactive projects, particularly those where the cost is shared with school boards, are in peril as budget cuts cripple education. Programs will only work where enlightened educators such as Samuel Hearne's principal, Harry Hunkin, or Buchanan Park's music teacher, Dawn Martens, make room in their curricula for opera as a tool for learning. Corporate sponsors willing to underwrite youth programs such as Altamira have to be nurtured and cultivated. Assessment of long-term programs is just now becoming a hot issue; the next few years will produce documentation that will presumably provide some feedback on the effectiveness of introducing children to opera at a young age.

Pacific Opera's Ouellette, however, doesn't need statistics to tell him what he can see at the box office: The generation of children who grew up attending dress rehearsals is now the college-age group that makes up POV's largest number of single-ticket buyers. As the COC's Calder says: "The more ways we find to make opera relevant to kids, the better chance we have of building an audience for the next century."