This weekend, Bodhi Tree Concerts presents the world premiere of the children’s opera “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote.” It is designed for kids, but everyone can enjoy its themes of love, hope and migration.
Bodhi Tree Concerts is dedicated to performing intentional acts of kindness, using music as a path toward enlightenment and understanding. At a piano rehearsal on Tuesday, I got my first glimpse of the opera. It’s a magical odyssey in which rivers come to life as a brave rabbit searches for his father.
"He was very naive," said Mariana Flores, who sings the role of Pancho Rabbit. "He's just a kid, and he feels like he can do it. He feels like a superhero. He's going to go and rescue his papa. So he goes and through this journey to cross the border with the help of the coyote."
Anthony Davis composed the score for this bilingual children’s opera.
"I wanted to do something about the border with the animal characters," Davis said. "I was thinking about George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.' I think it was very liberating for me as a composer to write with animal characters and get away from a realistic telling of the story."
It’s a border story Davis began working on during the first Trump administration.
"It's even a much more hostile environment now," Davis noted. "To me, it's part of the resistance to what I think is a flagrant disregard of human rights and of law that we see at the current time. We introduced some new characters like the orange snapping turtles building the wall and the child who's in a cage. That was a way of updating the story and raising the stakes of the opera. I think the opera also has a hopeful aspect of it with the migration of the monarch butterflies."
The butterflies are sung and played by a children's chorus.
"It's this sense of what a post-Trump world will be," Davis added. "The idea that migration is natural. It's part of nature. Having the monarch butterflies free the child from the cage is a very important part of that message. And that's something that's very important to me, that my art tries to make a difference, tries to say something, to move the needle somewhere, to get people to have empathy for other people, empathy for immigrants, empathy for migrant workers, that's something that music can do. "
Miguel Zazueta sings the role of Senior Rooster, who crosses the border with Papa Rabbit to seek work.
"It's a fable," Zaueta said. "It's a really nice way to make people understand all these perils and difficulties that immigrants have to go through when they cross the border and they do it because of need, because they need to survive, and that's the only way that they see possible to do it. So I think it's important to step into this story and hopefully find empathy and understanding with it."
In adapting the book, Davis said, "It took a while for us to find the right balance between the political and the magical, also between the reality of the story and the child's fantasy of the story."
Flores is excited to be part of a world premiere and to be the first person to sing the role of Pancho Rabbit. She is also eager to see how the audience responds.
"I think that the kids will love to see all the different characters," Flores said. "The color of the voices are different. It is exciting and I think kids will love it."
From hissing snakes to singing tunnels filled with bats, "Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote" serves up a story to excite young imaginations and challenge audiences to open their hearts to different perspectives. In the arts, empathy is not a weakness but a strength; it is the very essence of storytelling and what makes us human. It is also the driving force behind Bodhi Tree Concerts.
"Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote" will be performed this weekend at the Southwestern College Performing Arts Center and on Jan. 31 in Tijuana.
