About Opera Bhutan

Sharchop Gyalpo, the guardian king of the East playing a Dramnyen

Opera Bhutan Project

Created and directed by Aaron Carpene
Stage Director: Stefano Vizioli
Project Coordinator: Preston Scott

This project aims to create a new original production of GF Handel’s Acis & Galatea that incorporates elements of song, dance,instrumentation and visual arts from the remote Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan - a musical first. The project involves live creative production workshops and work-in-progress performances at the El Paso Opera, an unprecedented historic premiere of live opera in Bhutan, with follow up performances involving both Bhutanese and non-Bhutanese artists in the United States and elsewhere. This particular opera’s redemptive themes will resonate powerfully with contemporary audiences (especially from violence-plagued communities like those neighboring El Paso. 

George F. Handel

This project proposes the creation and production of the first live full-scale opera involving artists from the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan resulting from collaborative preparatory musical and other creative artistic workshops hosted by the El Paso Opera in the United States involving Bhutanese and non Bhutanese musicians, singers, artists and designers. Project collaborators will create an original new production of GF Handel’s Acis & Galatea for contemporary audiences by incorporating Bhutanese cultural expressions (voice, ritual dance, instrumentation, design and symbols) that are virtually unknown outside the remote Himalayan Kingdom. For the very first time, artists from the United States, Europe, Australia and the Eastern Himalayas together will create a new performing arts experience that reflects and celebrates the multiple cultural traditions involved in ways that will excite and engage audiences everywhere.   

Originally based on the myth recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this opera’s themes of compassion, happiness, death and rebirth also resonate deeply with many Bhutanese cultural idioms and spiritual values. The opera’s treatment of greed, anger, and ignorance (recognized as the three principal causes of existential suffering in Vajrayana Buddhism practiced in Bhutan) speaks poignantly to contemporary audiences everywhere(and especially in communities plagued by senseless violence). Of all musical genres, opera may share the most with Bhutanese musical expression by combining music, voice, movement and symbolism to convey deeply felt human experience. Rather than simply restaging a timeless classic, this new original production of Acis & Galatea will reflect an entirely contemporary experience and understanding of important shared human values born from some of the best of the West’s operatic performance arts as well as Bhutan’s own unique rich and vibrant cultural life.

A Tsechu performance at Trongsa Dzong

Music is very important in Bhutanese society and continues to be a major carrier of culture, spiritual values and tradition from generation to generation. With Bhutan’s ongoing opening to the outside world at a time of rapid globalization, opportunities for the Bhutanese people to hear and experience new musical expressions have increased. However, there have been very limited opportunities for the Bhutanese people to experience live Western classical music (voice or instruments) - and no live experience with the full expression of opera.

Likewise, most audiences in the West have no experience of the important music, dance, and other unique cultural expressions very much alive in the Eastern Himalayas. Accordingly, this project offers a particularly rare and enriching opportunity for everyone involved - audiences and artists alike - to explore and experience something new yet rooted in and inspired by genuinely important and vital authentic artistic traditions that know very little of each other or of their differing understandings of "art". Everyone can benefit from this unprecedented creative collaboration.   

The stunning Bhutanese-inspired campus of the University of Texas in El Paso

‘Opera Bhutan’ is a collaborative international music project with partners and contributors from around the world, including the El Paso Opera, the University of Texas at El Paso (because of its unique long standing relationship with Bhutan); and, the Music of Bhutan Research Center based in Santa Cruz, California and Thimphu, Bhutan (for coordinating Bhutanese artistic input and support). Direction in Bhutan is organized in cooperation with the Royal Government of Bhutan, with participation and support from the Royal Academy of Performing Arts and the Music of Bhutan Research Center. Prominent cultural catalysts from the United States and abroad also are providing additional important project support.

This new production of Acis & Galatea requires the following musical talents: 

 - Orchestra of 17 Western instruments plus 5 additional Bhutanese

   instruments

 - 4 solo singers and 14 chorus members

 - 1 Bhutanese singer

 - 12 Bhutanese dancers

The January 2012 pre-production planning work scheduled in Bhutan has set the stage for follow-up creative production workshops in El Paso in April 2012.  The artists will work together through a series of experimental live performance workshops at the El Paso Opera under the guidance and direction of Aaron Carpene and Stefano Vizioli to build the blocks of dance, movement and music required to properly reflect the diverse cultural expressions involved in this original new production. The workshops will include “work-in-progress” performances in El Paso, to be followed by a premiere performance of Acis & Galatea in Bhutan on 12 October 2013 (all expected to generate widespread international interest). The production will then return to the El Paso Opera for its US premiere in September 2014, with the aim of traveling elsewhere to excite and inspire other audiences too.