EDUCATION
REGENERATION, IMPACT AND SUSTAINABILITY
This project is as much about the future as it is the past. By putting Venice and Venetians at the centre of this project, the theatre will offer Venice a sympathetic contribution to a commercially secure and environmentally sustainable future. Both in build and in operation, the Teatro San Cassiano will create new jobs, new businesses, new opportunities, and all driven out of an ethos for a sustainable regeneration of Venice.
By embracing its shared cultural heritage, but with a modern global outlook, the Teatro San Cassiano will deliver the perfect blend of employment, investment and regeneration to Venice that is simply unprecedented in modern times. This is an Impact project delivering long-term sustainability. Since its launch, the Group has targeted contracts to over 35 Venetian companies and the completed theatre will employ c. 200 direct and indirect staff. The theatre will create and maintain its own historically-informed scenery and costumes, offering apprenticeships and employment to Italy’s talented artisans.
The Teatro San Cassiano’s outreach programme will reimagine the meaning of “public opera” in the 21st century. In addition to an “open-access” policy for all the community to make it “their” theatre, the planned outreach projects will inspire the next generation and all parts of the community to place the theatre at the heart of a shared Venetian identity. Singers, musicians and production staff will take opera scenes into schools and to the wider community to educate, to rehearse and ultimately to perform in the San Cassiano before their own families. Music therapy will be a continuous and core element therein.
The theatre itself will form the perfect example of “Historical New Build” using traditional methods blending with modern technology with the objective of a carbon negative contribution to the Venetian environment, flora and fauna both in its build and operation.
MUSIC ACADEMIES
We have already started to explore our future relationship with two of the world’s most renowned music academies and agreed informal partnerships to promote education:
- Schola Cantorum Basiliensis
- Conservatorio di Musica “Benedetto Marcello” di Venezia
We want to put young musicians at the forefront of what we do and create exciting educational programmes that will work in collaboration with our partners to place the Teatro San Cassiano at the centre of “Master’s Degree” programmes where tomorrow’s great artists can learn their trade and work on projects such as taking an opera from first day rehearsal to a full staging.
We also want to keep performance at the centre of all we do and thus hope to collaborate in future productions with our partners to give young singers and musicians an opportunity to perform in Venice at the Teatro San Cassiano.
MUSEUM
The theatre will function as a public museum during non-performance times. We also want to explore how to become a ‘public’ theatre in the modern sense through promoting, maintaining, improving and advancing education programmes for children in respect of the history, development, staging and performance of Venetian and Italian Baroque opera.
EDUCATION AND MUSIC THERAPY
The Teatro San Cassiano was famously the first theatre to introduce opera to the wider public. Our hope is that the educational arm of the theatre will continue this work in a modern 21st century context by introducing opera to as wide a community as possible. Opera is and should always be accessible for all.
As well as functioning as a public museum during non-performance times we will instigate an outreach partnership with local schools to bring children into the theatre to engage and interact with all aspects of opera performance and production.
Music therapy has been proven to aid a variety of healthcare and educational needs. It offers ideal synergies by which opera can increase public awareness of its benefits through initiating a programme of music therapy services—related where possible to opera—that can improve and help the lives of Venetians and play an intrinsic role in the well-being of its local community.
