Imagine an opera where one of the singers can jump in a cab between acts, go to a different venue and continue in the same production. Imagine an opera that is being watched not just by several live audiences, but by people right round the globe from Alaska to New Zealand. And most amazing of all, imagine an opera where some of the script writers, singers, and scenery painters are primary schoolchildren from inner-city London. Yes, it's all true... and I didn't even mention the laser beams.

While it may not entertain the purists, Virtual Carmen looks like being the event of the year for most of the participants, when it gets its one and only cyber-performance on July 3, as part of Islington Arts Week.

At Virtual Carmen's core is the group of professionals who make up the English Pocket Opera Company. According to Epoc's Tracey Low, the company's aim is "to make opera accessible. We perform in English, and we perform on a very small scale: you can hear every word. It's very immediate. We are a performing company, but education is one of our remits."

This year, Epoc has been running Carmen Education, a project that has involved 10,000 children in 60 schools across seven London boroughs. This started with events called Opera Hotpots, where Epoc held introductory workshops in schools.

Nineteen of the schools had residencies, where Epoc provided three days of intensive art, drama and music workshops with up to 30 pupils. The workshops led to 5- to 10-minute mini-operas written by the kids based on the issues raised by the story of Carmen - The Choice of Don José. Some of these were incorporated with contributions from Hotpots in a series of schools matinee performances at the Cochrane Theatre in central London.

As everyone who has ever put on a school play knows, this isn't just about performing. Children can get involved at different levels with a wide range of things such as creating the words and music, the make-up, the costumes, the choreography, the sets, the props, the sound effects, and more technical matters including lighting and sound.

With Virtual Carmen, the event has become a learning experience for Epoc as well. "It's the technology that has been different about this project for us - working with the internet, doing video diaries, and so on," Tanja van Oudtshoorn, the company's education officer and a workshop leader.

"We also used text messaging [on mobile phones] and that went down very well: it is so much less dry than writing a précis, which is what schools used to do.

"Our ethos as a company - taking the exclusivity out of opera - fits very well with the democratisation that's being brought by the internet, though the technology is not quite there yet. You don't get the energy that you get with a live performance."

The idea for Virtual Carmen came from Derek Smith, director of the Kings Cross Education Action Zone. Last year, the zone ran the Genesis Project, based on video production, and they wanted something to build on that success. Ideally it should also involve video-conferencing, because the six schools in the area - five primaries and one secondary - had already been networked together using high-speed laser links.

Smith's first thought was to do a virtual concert, with contributions being beamed in from the separate schools. A virtual opera offered more possibilities, and the team could build on the work already being done by Epoc. Each school could tackle one act, or half an act, and create its own sets, with the whole thing being combined on video screens.

The virtual production could then be piped to a separate audience at Platform 1, a sort of community cybercafe built in the grounds of the Elizabeth Garret Anderson secondary school, and webcast over the internet.

Peter Barrett, ICT Project Manager for the action zone, says the virtual performance is being put together on stage at the Copenhagen primary school.

"Basically there is one big screen that can be split to take four inputs, with two flat plasma screens at the side. The girls from the secondary school are using video cameras loaned by Canon, so there will be a range of different shots: it's much more interesting than the usual video-conferencing where you just have a fixed camera."

The screens will also show slide-shows of artwork the children have created, as well as live and recorded singers. The whole virtual performance will then be mixed by Leon Cych, a digital video and web specialist, and streamed via the London Grid For Learning on to the web.

"Just getting the equipment together would have cost us £20,000," says Barrett, "but a lot of companies have loaned things or put their skills in for nothing or for very small amounts."

Backers include Canon, Espresso, Global Leap, Global VideoCom, U-Lead, ViewCast, Xchanging and others. One of the biggest backers is NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, which was founded under the 1998 National Lottery Act to support and promote talent, innovation and creativity.

NESTA is giving the project a learning award valued at £27,500, and hopes it will provide a model of 'best practice' that others can learn from. NESTA's education director, Gareth Binns, says that, as far as they know, this kind of broadband-based virtual performance has never been done before in the UK, and that "if it is successful, it could play a key part in revolutionising interactive education." The project is being evaluated by Professor David Jenkins and others for Pley (Proactive Learning from Early Years).

There are, of course, at least two potential stumbling blocks - opera and technology - but neither seems to have been a problem.

The opera hasn't been a problem because Epoc has focused on the choices faced by Don Jose in Prosper Merimee's Carmen - in other words, on Bizet's source rather than Bizet's production. These choices would be familiar in the plot of EastEnders. Also, as Tracey Low says, "the younger kids don't have any preconceptions about opera being highbrow. They're playing the roles, so it's very interactive."

Nor have they been frightened by the technology. "Even though I have been doing this for a long time, I'm still amazed by the way kids relate to it," says Barrett. "You get 7 year-olds taking digital pictures and dropping them into Word, and they can do Excel formulas without knowing a word of English. Yes, it's an inner London deprived area, but the children are so motivated, you don't notice."

Deprived it may be, but King's Cross does have an edge few areas can match: the infra-red laser network, which shifts data between schools at 100 megabits a second - 200 times faster than BT's home broadband ADSL.

The Gigabit Ethernet link from the secondary school to the main primary is 10 times faster than that. The network was designed and installed by CSE Education Systems using laser equipment from CableFree Solutions.

Broadband laser networks use lasers similar to the ones in CD players, but bigger. They offer high speeds and are quick to set up: you can link two nearby buildings at 100mbps in less than three hours at a cost of about £5,000. CableFree's Penny Lee says: "It's like having a fibre optic cable through the air."

Once installed, they work transparently: users can't tell whether the network is based on leased lines or lasers. But they do have two disadvantages: the signals don't go very far, and they don't go through hills or round corners. The normal range is one or two kilometres, or less, and you must have a line of sight connection.

Kxeaz was lucky in that five of its schools could be seen from the roof of Copenhagen primary, which acts as the network hub. The primaries connect to Copenhagen by 100mbps laser systems, and Copenhagen sends the data to the secondary school via the gigabit link. The secondary school also connects to the Angel primary school via a 100mbps link. Ultimately, of course, the network has to connect to the internet via a high-speed cable, but one landline is cheaper than six.

The laser network is much faster than that needed for simple internet access, but it has been designed for video-conferencing between the various schools. A lot of people still can't see the point of that, but with bandwidth becoming ever cheaper and more plentiful, it will be commonplace by the time today's primary schoolchildren grow up.

Installing it now provides ways to use technology creatively, as Virtual Carmen shows, and also represents an investment that will pay returns in the future. As Leon Cych says: "That's really where we want the country to go, isn't it?"


Links:

Epoc - www.pocketopera.co.uk
Virtual Carmen - www.carmenavalook.com
Genesis Project - www.kxeaz.com/Genesis.html
CSE - www.cse-net.co.uk
CableFree - www.cablefree.co.uk