Henny Penny

Impact: Societal, Cultural

Description of impact

A series of 5 practice-based research projects in opera and libretto composition has: exposed new constituencies to opera; opened new routes to participation; led to the establishment of new inter-institutional and inter-sectoral production mechanisms; harnessed music as a tool for language education; and embedded cross-curricular learning in primary schools.

This body of work by researchers at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, incrementally developed over a decade, has increased opera’s capacity to act as a vehicle for cultural inclusion and education beyond music and drama. Its constituent projects operate at the interfaces of the research and development of new operatic work (including participatory and co-creation processes), arts education and outreach, public policy on languages, and school curriculum design.

The principal beneficiaries have been the young people participating in the creation and reception of these works, most recently pupils at 6 schools exposed to modes of learning that increase literacy in the neglected subjects of languages and music simultaneously, and also foster social and cultural inclusion for those with English as an additional language. Schools, individual teachers, and local government education policymakers have also been influenced, in the areas of curriculum design and pedagogical practice, by the demonstrated advantages of cross-curricular education.

The series of operatic works by Professor Julian Philips (Head of Composition), latterly with Professor Stephen Plaice (playwright and librettist), culminated in Henny Penny (2020). Building on their education-in-opera approaches to explore opera-as-education, Henny Penny explores the possibilities for opera to support not only music but also modern languages teaching in years five and six.

An in-school production requiring minimal resources, Henny Penny is a participatory opera whose research and development explored the various models of opera education and outreach to determine how opera can best support modern language learning and cross-curricular approaches in primary education generally. Any participating school can create and perform its own Henny opera in a range of languages: French (Cocotte Chocotte), German (Hennig Pfennig), Spanish (Pollita Chiquita) or Italian (Sabrina Gallina) as well as English (Henny Penny). The adaptation of the folk tale of Henny Penny provides a thorough immersion in language by being ‘through-composed’ and by casting the children as commenting chorus and characters, interacting with the central figures of Henny Penny and Fox Lox and a clarinet/violin/piano ensemble.

So far children at six schools have participated in performances. For native English speakers encountering Henny Penny, the embodied and rhythmic nature of operatic performance enabled swifter embedding of language learning. For those with English as an additional language, the opportunity to work in (i.e. not simply on) their first language, or for language to be equally foreign to their peers, was transformative.

Henny Penny was originally jointly funded by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and a consortium led by the University of Manchester using a c.£4m grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open World Research Initiative. It fed into a wider research project, ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’.
Impact date2014
Category of impactSocietal, Cultural
Impact levelEngagement