Four 10-minute operas by young people at Riverview Hospital are set to be staged in New Haven by the Hillhouse Opera Company. The works were conceived, created, and performed at the hospital last summer through the Riverview Opera Project, a series of workshops designed by Dr. David Sasso and composer Deborah Teason.
In February, the opera company launched a fundraising campaign at kickstarter.com to help defray the costs of producing the operas. The campaign raised $5,040 toward the project’s $20,000 budget.
Victoria Leigh Gardner, Hillhouse Opera Company’s general manager, told the New Haven Independent in February that she’d invited the Connecticut Mental Health Center to participate in bringing the operas to New Haven.
The Riverview Operas poster features original illustrations by ACES Educational Center for the Arts students Jovanzie Polanco and Riana Rodgers.
Tuesday, Kyle Pedersen, director of the Connecticut Mental Health Center Foundation, said his organization is the presenting sponsor of the local productions, though Gardner is still seeking additional sponsorship.
“We’re doing it from a public awareness and a prevention point of view,” Pedersen said.
While the Connecticut Mental Health Center serves adults ages 18 and older, Pedersen said “we recognize that it’s important to (bring awareness to) the serious issues that young people face.”
Pedersen said that he and Sasso “have had lengthy conversations about the importance of using art in mental-health settings … not for the therapeutic value, per se, but for the artistic value.”
Sasso, a psychiatrist who studied composition at the Indiana University School of Music before attending the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and training in adult and child psychiatry at Yale University, hopes the benefit of having the operas produced by Hillhouse Opera Company will be twofold.
One goal is “really to have the project fund itself” in the future, “Sasso said on Tuesday. That is, that the production will eventually be self-sustaining and allow him to pursue future opera projects at Riverview Hospital, a state-run psychiatric facility in Middletown.
The other goal, Sasso said, is “to bring the work that the kids did to a larger audience.”
“Their work is really remarkable,” Sasso said.
In conceiving characters, plots, music, and lyrics, the children were able to “put aspects of themselves” into the stories in a “safe” way, Sasso said.
The challenge facing Hillhouse Opera Company, Pedersen said, is to figure out “how to capture the spirit of the original production that was created and performed by youth.”
“A lot of what we did with the children up at Riverview was … improvised,” Sasso explained. “They’re not trained musicians. … We had to find a way to make that work.”
To that end, he and Teason transcribed each of the original performances to create “a version that stayed true to the spirit of what the kids did.”
To further maintain that spirit, Hillhouse Opera Company tapped opera director and New Haven resident Peter Webster to lead the productions.
“We really feel that he is able to capture the spirit,” Gardner said.
Ultimately, Sasso said, staging the children’s operas will “shine a light on struggles they go through and their successes.”
The Riverview Operas will be staged on Friday, May 6, at 6 p.m., at Harkness Auditorium at the Yale Medical School, and on Saturday, June 18, at 2 p.m., at the New Haven Free Public Library. The performances are free and open to the public (with a $20 suggested donation). More information is available at Hillhouse Opera Company’s website.