Screening Carmen

Production of Carmen

"This production of Carmen bore all the classic elements of Bizet's tragic love story, performed by singers from the school and English Pocket Opera Company (Epoc), and an orchestra from the nearby Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school (the only secondary in the zone) in Copenhagen's main hall. But it also departed from tradition in a radical way - the live action was supplemented by scenes from other schools, performed and filmed by children and beamed live, via the lasers, on to a bank of three large plasma screens behind the stage. Visually, the show is amazing, with the action switching between the stage and images of children's paintings or live sequences on the screens. It's a creatively updated version, set in outer space, and with some of the story told via text messages between Carmen and Don Jose.

And it is uplifting to see an art form stereotyped as elitist being performed with such gusto by a bunch of inner-city kids. As they leave the stage following a final, rousing rendition of the "Toreador Song", there are whoops of delight from the cast.

To appreciate the complexity and scale of the production, you have to go behind the scenes - up the stairs to the control room in a converted top floor classroom of the school - and rewind a couple of days. Andy Davies, the media resource manager, is trying to edit a recorded sequence of Epoc's Darren Fox, who plays Don Jose, which will appear as a duet, with Carmen (Harriet Williams) singing live. "The thing is," he says, "nobody knows how anything is going to work because it's never been done before. Our attitude is, if it sounds like a good idea, let's go for it. There's none of this 'Oh, we can't do that'."