In creating this opera, composer Bruce Gaston was inspired by ideas found in the Booker Award-winning novel Life of Pi by Yann Martell, but he has moved far from the novel’s premise into a meditation about modern children living with HIV, in which the Tiger becomes a metaphor for the virus the children must learn to live with.

Orignally conceived as a music drama performed entirely by the HIV-infected children of Baan Gerda in Lopburi, Gaston has expanded this work so that children from all segments of Thai society can perform together and learn that the infected may participate completely and fully in a professional production alongside the most talented “normal” kids.

Pi, a young Asian boy, lives in what he feels to be “the best of all possible worlds.”  His father runs a zoo, so Pi’s home is filled with animals in tranquil surroundings.  His keen adolescent religious sense further inspires him to see the harmony and beauty in all living things.

His father teaches Pi a cruel lesson about the dangers of anthropormorphizing animals. He starves four lions for four days and then releases them to devour a goat.  Pi is shocked at the beastiality of the scene.

Even with this training in understanding animals exactly as they are and not what we would wish them to be, he is completely unprepared for what will happen when his family, animals and all, make a journey across the Pacific ocean to start a new life in America.

When a storm sinks their cargo ship, Pi is left on a solitary lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena and a huge 450-pound Bengal tiger.

In this adaption as a children’s opera, the young boy makes an extraordinary discovery: he is part of a living cosmos balanced precariously between chaos and order.

Harmony and beauty take on completely new meanings when Pi must learn to co-exist with a tiger on a small boat bobbing about on a vast sea with no shore in sight.

 

 Bruce Gaston, the composer, has combined  the Orff Schulwerk system of music education  with the rich tradition of Thai classical singing and xylophone playing to create the music for the opera.

an opera by children for adults by Bruce Gaston

for technical reasons this production is postponed until Spring 2010