Build Your Own House Game

Reaching new audiences is a challenge for all branches of art, but this challenge is even more so when you're an opera company trying to keep an art form of the eighteenth century, although living in the twenty-first century.

The music, voices and dramatic stories based on strong unchanging human emotions have stood the test of time, but in the medium plush, quick, screen-age computer games, entertainment, high octane and the lack of attention can inject new life into an ancient art form to make it relevant to a new audience?

Where is the ideal space for opera between the explosion of entertainment easily accessible? How can reinvent opera for hip-hop generation? How can you fight against the stigma of "elitism" and creating websites really popular for performance?

These are issues familiar to all modern opera companies, and to which there is no easy answer.

Some companies achieve through schools and youth groups to engage youth in developing new ways to perform the work. They hope that once young people have discovered for themselves the transcendent power of this timeless music, it will be a tremendous force for good in their lives.

Others took opera outside the opera and collaborated with television production companies to create truly popular programs such as Channel 4 break ground "Operatunity 'in 2004 or ITV" Britain's Got Talent. "

Their efforts have proved that, far from taking what is perceived by many in the United Kingdom as a rich man's club, the opera has always true universal appeal.

Following these excursions television Lovlisetta Giubblis and his partner Fanny Batta, both with a successful career as a soprano behind them, have gone a step further.

In 2007, the two women, two continental Europeans now based in the United Kingdom, began the task of building a new opera, one whose repertoire to attract a new type of spectator. One who banish forever the idea that opera is a stuffy, exclusive, entertainment pompous irrelevant in modern society.

Ms. Giubblis explains: "We have talked to many young people across the UK and it is depressing to note that for them the opera was only some white fat people singing in a foreign language to an audience of pretentious, rich coffin Dodgers.

"We decided to do everything we can to change that perception."

The pair has now begun looking at what interests young people who would never normally be drawn to opera, hoping to bring some culture to the old public housing projects and dilapidated areas urban.

"We wanted to capture the ASBO generation" and convince them to drop their knives, stop texting, removing their hoods, and give off Snoop Dogg Puccini, "says Ms. Batta.

"So we ran some focus groups around some of the most accessible tunes, and we quickly realized that the answer lies in harnessing the power of the Internet and video over the Internet and mobile phones. We needed to build our house opera in cyberspace, it would be in the neighborhood everyone. "

"Another thing we realized pretty quickly is that nobody will watch a full-blown opera on TV, we needed to develop short versions of classic operas more suited to the medium. We wanted to keep classical melodies, but we must create new stories more relevant to life in the Ghetto. "

"The language has also been a major obstacle. The children wanted to understand what was being sung. We've been looking around for a librettist who could write for an audience of young people. Someone who could speak with their voices. "

The missing piece of the puzzle turned out to be Emiliano Fista, an Italian Barito.