I am part of a five-year opera creation project Reflective Iterative Scenario Reenactments (RISE). I collaborated with Cynthia Kinnunen, a Laurier graduate student and an incredible music educator specializing in ukulele (although good at a lot of things!). Together we incorporated community members into the opera creation process of two projects.
Cynthia and I found it really challenging to incorporate participatory music practices into the opera creation processes. In part, we began the project at the height of the pandemic, when no one could gather. Another difficult aspect is that even when gathering became possible, most of the project team was located in Montreal, and we are 600 km away.
But there are other, deeper challenges around process and expectation, and we noticed how our language sometimes reinforced divisions rather than crossed them. So we engaged in a series of dialogues between the two of us, and used critical discourse studies to try to make sense of our conversations. This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
The result is an article published in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Community Music. The article is behind a paywall, so if you want to read it but don’t have access, drop me an email at dyerichuk@wlu.ca. Let me know what you think!
Yerichuk, D., & Kinnunen, C. (2023). Fumbling towards community-engaged opera creation: A reflexive dialogue. International Journal of Community Music, 16(3), 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijcm_00087_1
