The Riots as Opera--Students Find Voices

If there was a broad, luminous marquee above their school auditorium, the headline would read: RIOT OPERA! Premiere Performance of “Another Smoky Night” and “Florence and Normandie.” All new shows! All new actors! But with no bright lights to herald their debut, 60 high school students will rely on their big city experiences and their creative skills to pull them through their first stage entrance before hundreds of their peers today and Tuesday.

At Manual Arts and Fremont high schools in South-Central Los Angeles, two classes of art and social studies students wrote and now act and sing in dual 20-minute operas. Along the way--designing sets, scrounging for props and rehearsing on a cold stage--they learned a lesson in confidence building and working together.

Under a special six-week program sponsored by the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, the youths put their experiences and feelings during the Los Angeles riots into dramatic but hopeful expressions of song, rap and dance.

“We did it all,” said Cindy Rodriguez, 16, as she stood backstage during a Friday morning rehearsal. “We made the story. We are the actors. It’s up to us to show everyone that we do care about our community.”

When Manual Arts art teacher Doreen Barsky explained to her 11th-grade art students that the next class assignment would be a study of the opera, a chorus of groans echoed through the classroom.

“I thought the opera was a bunch of fat old people screaming and making a lot of noise,” said Evelia Del Toro, 16, moments before she skipped across the stage as a looter with a sack of goods slung over her shoulder.

But with the guidance of young professional musicians, actors and a composer, the students were guided through a personal exercise in artful expression. Students first wrote an essay or poem about their feelings during the riots that exploded in their communities.

The writings were compiled into vignettes and strung together through music and verse:

“People are going crazy, breaking into everything they see. . . . I never knew my people could be so cold,” rapped Monee Hogan in the show finale. “It’s time to stand together and do what we know is right, or will have to live through another smoky night.”

Hogan, who harbors dreams of an acting and singing career, said that this will be her only opportunity this year to perform because school district budget cuts have eliminated extracurricular drama at her school.

“This is our one chance to show people that we have pride in our culture,” Hogan said. “It’s just a matter of having people come out and help us.”

For most students the show is the first time they have set foot on a stage or spoken into a microphone--an exercise that for many turned into an act of courage.

“For me, this is the first time I can really openly express myself, show some self-esteem,” said Xochil Vera, 16, of Fremont. “This is a way for us to show our community that when we are given the chance, we can really do something positive. We can make it.”

As Lourdes Torres, 16, of Manual Arts blasted out the lines in her role as a television reporter, Barsky shook her head in disbelief and said: “She’s so shy, she’s so quiet, this has helped her so much.”

Torres, gleaming with satisfaction, agreed. “I think I have more confidence now,” she said.

The Fremont students focused their opera around racial themes, depicting fights among African-Americans, Latinos and police. In the epilogue to their opera, one character sings: “All the . . . riots we’ve gone through, started with racism and will end with racism . . . until we all decide to unite and become as one.”

Several African-American and Latino students said that working on the opera proved to be a lesson in bridging racial gulfs on their campus.

“Before this, people of different races didn’t want to sit by each other in class and stayed on their side of the yard,” said Kelvin Perry, 19, who performs a rap routine. “But during the opera, people from all sides of the yard are on the same stage.”

Roxana Sandoval, 18, turned into a kind of senior class opera adviser to her junior classmates at Fremont, which is only blocks away from a flash point of the riots, Florence and Normandie avenues. Last year, she was involved in a similar drama course.

“This inspires us, it makes us feel that what we have to say is important,” Sandoval said. “Everyone in this city thinks that we must all be bad if we live on this side of town. But they don’t know us. They don’t see us working together like this.”