Martyn Harry’s Fellowship enabled him to mount the initial creative workshops that launched his children’s opera project, ‘Vehicles’. His previous opera, ‘My Mother Told Me Not To Stare’, which was toured around the UK by Action Transport Theatre and Theatre Hullabaloo in 2010 and 2012, had been based on a libretto by a remarkable children’s author, Fin Kruckemeyer, but for ‘Vehicles’ Martyn wanted to work more directly with primary school children and their creative ideas.
‘I was discussing with Nina Hajiyianni of Action Transport Theatre how to mount projects in Oxford and the Wirral where Action Transport is based,’ Martyn explains, ‘when we suddenly noticed an extraordinary coincidence. Both Blackbird Leys and Ellesmere Port are the sites for large car factories, BMW Cowley and Vauxhall respectively’.
Realising that many of their target participants came from families, members of whom had worked in these factories either now or at some time in the past, we decided to make this coincidence the starting point for our project. ‘By calling the project ‘Vehicles’ we were not only thinking of this aspect,’ Martyn reports, ‘but the idea that our project might be a ‘vehicle’ of expression for the children we were working with’.
A project team of Martyn, Nina, soprano Jessica Summers and Oxford student, Stephen Bradshaw then delivered a series of workshops in primary schools in Blackbird Leys that challenged the children to come up with ideas for a new opera. ‘The children not only came up with ideas for specific scenes, but drew pictures and performed musical improvisations which we were able to record and make the basis of specific scenes’, Martyn explains.
By coincidence, Martyn was approached at the same time by a primary school in Banbury that wanted to create a new percussion piece out of car parts from Silverstone Racing Course, and this piece, ‘The Mini-Parts Orchestra’ also fed material into the ‘Vehicles’ project. ‘I came away with a surprisingly clear brief from all the children I worked with,’ Martyn says. ‘Everyone agreed that every scene needed to be based on a different type of transport technology.
It was a real challenge to create an opera out of this idea, because opera thrives on narrative and powerful dramatic situations. But the children’s ideas pushed us in a novel direction’. ‘Vehicles’ has now become a 55-minute opera for four singers which was premiered by Operasonic in Newport, Wales, in March 2020. 393 children attended the opera’s first performance, many of whom had participated in STEAM-based creative workshops about innovation in engineering. This was due to be the first leg of a national tour that has had to be delayed due to Covid-19, but will be reinstated in 2021.
‘The first performances were a great success,’ explains Martyn. ‘You really noticed that the difference that it made for a primary school’s audience that the original ideas for our opera had come from children their own age’.
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