‘Rocking Horse Winner’ opens Ammolite Opera’s second season in Calgary

Have you ever been to the opera? If not, why not?

A new Calgary company, Ammolite Opera, sings only in English, uses contemporary scripts, and purposefully keeps the audience close to the action.

The company is opening its second season this week with Rocking Horse Winner, running Sept. 3–7 at the Evan Hazell Theatre inside the Seton YMCA.

Ammolite’s mandate sets it apart from traditional companies. It produces operas composed by living artists, sung in English, and performed only by Canadian talent. It’s all about bringing the art form to more accessible levels.

“People don’t really know opera in general in Alberta,” says artistic director Tayte Mitchell. “People have compared us to feeling like they see film, like they forget that we’re singing the whole time. We pride ourselves in something that is immediate on one end, but also artistically satisfying and has many layers of meaning on top.”

Mitchell knows the Alberta vocal arts scene well. Born and raised in Vulcan, he sang with the Calgary Boys Choir and got his start in the Calgary Opera chorus at just 17. After years of study and performance abroad, the pandemic brought him home and spurred him to create a company where world-class opera could thrive in his own backyard.

Though the productions are local, the talent is global.

“They sing everywhere,” Mitchell said. “They sing with San Francisco Opera, Montreal Opera, Canadian Opera Company. One of our baritones in the show right now is flying straight to China after this for a massive production of Carmen. And the people we’re bringing all have a connection to Alberta, whether they trained here, grew up here, or have family here — but they’re freakishly talented.”

Ammolite has already made a name for itself. Its very first production in their inaugural season, Proving Up, won a Betty Mitchell Award in 2024 for Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Musical – Geoffrey Schellenberg.

The second season opens with Rocking Horse Winner, a Canadian opera by Gareth Williams and Anna Chatterton based on the D.H. Lawrence short story. It tells of a widowed mother and her son, who discovers that riding his attic rocking horse reveals the winners of real races. The winnings ease the family’s burdens, but each ride costs the boy a piece of himself.

“It’s tragic,” Mitchell says. “Every time he rides this rocking horse, he loses a bit of himself. But it makes us question what happiness really is, how we use the time that we have, and how money distorts our ability to hear each other.”

Rocking Horse Winner runs Sept. 3–7, 2025 at the Evan Hazell Theatre at the Seton YMCA.

Tickets and more information can be found here.