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Youth With Mental Illness Have Operas Produced

by David Brensilver | Feb 24, 2011 3:16 pm

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Hillhouse Opera Company plans to produce four 10-minute operas by young people suffering from mental illness. With space reserved at the Yale Medical School for May 6 performances, the company has launched an online campaign to raise $5,000 toward the project’s $20,000 estimated budget. 

The operas were completed this past summer by “children and adolescents” at Riverview Hospital, a state-operated psychiatric facility in Middletown. Specifically, the operas are the yield of the Riverview Opera Project, a series of workshops designed by physician and composer Dr. David Sasso and composer Deborah Teason.

Victoria Leigh Gardner, Hillhouse Opera Company’s general manager, said, “The whole intent of the project is .. [to] show that music can be healing and is healing.”

Hillhouse Opera Company, Gardner said, believes in “the goal of creating a better world through music.” The company’s mission, she said, is “to involve the community in opera.”

According to the organization’s website, Hillhouse Opera Company’s mission is “to produce and promote opera in the wider community” and “to promote community through opera.”

Gardner said participants in the Riverview Opera Project were organized into four groups, each of which conceived plots, identified characters, wrote librettos, and composed music that was realized and notated by Sasso and Teason. The operas were performed at Riverview Hospital. 

Hillhouse Opera Company, with an eye on producing and performing the operas in May, has launched a fundraising campaign at kickstarter.com and has invited the Connecticut Mental Health Center to participate.

In August 2010, Hillhouse Opera Company, in collaboration with the Connecticut Mental Health Center Foundation, CitySeed, and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, produced pop-up opera at CitySeed Market on the Hill. Click on the play arrow to watch video on the event.

At press time, Hillhouse Opera Company’s online fundraising campaign—which will end on March 25—had raised (in pledges) $785 toward the $5,000 goal.

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