To Michael Williams, making music is not simply about, well, making music. The general manager of Cape Town Opera – who also happens to be a prolific composer and novelist – believes it’s about telling stories through sound and song and feeding off a myriad of muses – both classical and contemporary. In fact two of his most memorable operas and musicals, Orphans of Qumbu and Who Killed Jimmy Valentine, take their subjects from street-level life. His artists are not plucked from performing arts institutions but township schools. And his most avid audiences are youths who are more familiar with composers like Moby than Mozart.
Since 2000, under the banner of Musicmakers, Williams has taken opera to the township. He has provided schools with the scores, librettos, novels and teacher guides to enable them to produce their own shows. The schools’ repertoires have included The Orphans of Qumbu, Who Killed Jimmy Valentine and Animals which is an opera created by Willem van der Walt in 1982, based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Intent on promoting a culture of performing indigenous theatre in secondary schools, Williams’ latest project entails launching a series of workshops to introduce Four Musicals for Young People (the latest inclusion is Crocodiles) to teachers and learners countrywide, from Oudtshoorn to Potchefstroom.
Funds are coming from the coffers of MMINO, a Norwegian education and music programme aiming to strengthen African musical culture through establishing links between South African and Norwegian music initiatives.
MNINO provided Williams with R100 000 to organise six workshops, which will deal with strategies for successfully mounting a musical from auditions to opening night and techniques on teaching music and stagecraft.
‘It’s essential to move away from the stereotype of opera as an art form by and for the elite,” he says.
When Musicmakers first hit the townships in 2000, Williams discovered that few teachers at historically disadvantaged schools had a history of opera appreciation.
It took a lot of doing, but eight years after staging The Orphans of Qumbu at Artscape, 1 600 learners have had a chance to sing the chorus in school productions.
‘It’s so gratifying to see young people I worked with who can still remember every lyric, every melody. It’s as though a switch has been turned on inside them that will never be turned off,” says Williams.