What is Get Close to Opera about?
The GET CLOSE TO OPERA project will develop and promote inclusive and multicultural arts education and training programmes seeking to support best practice in migrant and refugee contexts. The training methodology will use Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory and focus on Opera as the delivery artform.
GET CLOSE TO OPERA brings together a partnership of organisations from across Europe – Materahub (Italy), Teatro L’Albero (Italy), Opera Circus (UK), Fundacio Privada Promocio d’Escoles (Spain), University of Patras (Greece), European Network of Migrant Women (Belgium) and RESEO (Belgium) and RESEO, the International Association for Higher Education in Opera and Dance.
GET CLOSE TO OPERA is inspired by opera as an artform that embraces multiple languages and engages its audiences emotionally through music. We believe that through opera we can unleash the potential to reach across barriers, creatively communicate, and explore what we have in common.
GET CLOSE TO OPERA recognises the wide range of activity that has already been created in this context, and seeks to engage with opera houses, opera companies, singers, musicians, dancers, actors, cultural mediators, facilitators and cultural practitioners working through the arts in migrant and refugee contexts, and educators interested in non-formal arts education.
Over the next two years until 2019, we will develop and test with them a new methodology, exploring the opportunities that the Theory of Multiple Intelligence could contribute to informal education training and skills in Opera. After a preparatory research phase, we will design an innovative training programme for educators and trainers, which will take place in Matera (Italy) in 2019. We will then apply the methodology developed through a series of pilot actions involving migrants and refugees that will be carried out in Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium and United Kingdom. MIT was named by Howard Gardner, more information here. multipleintelligencesoasis.org
We understand that the level of informal education in the arts is at a different stage of progress in different countries. Working with our partners across Europe we will bring together our learning and the opportunities for the advancement of formal education in the arts in each country.
We will share our experience and our tools on an online platform open with all those who wish to experiment and share the GET CLOSE TO OPERA research and resulting methodology throughout Europe.
Opera Circus will be approaching facilitators and cultural practitioners from their wide network to assist with the research and with our partners and organisations in this field, explore what is available to learn from, and share within, this sector.
Further information from the Get Close to Opera web site. Please get in touch with Opera Circus on admin@operacircus.co.uk if you would like to participate in the general survey. The survey link will be sent out on the morning of the 8th January 2018.
