By Nicholas K. Geranios
Associated Press Writer
Monday, Aug. 27, 2001; 2:27 p.m. EDT

USK, Wash. –– The tiny tribe of Kalispel Indians is staging an outdoor opera on its reservation this week with help from what Kalispel elder Francis Cullooyah calls "the Mozart tribe."

The Mozarts – actually opera singers from New York, Seattle, and Spokane – are joining the Kalispels in staging a production of "The Magic Flute" on the tribe's open-air powwow grounds Wednesday night, next to a buffalo herd, with the Selkirk Mountains as backdrop.

Opera is not the first thing that springs to mind when one enters Usk, a community of perhaps 200 people about 50 miles north of Spokane, and sees pickup trucks, a timber mill and a few restaurants.

But it came to Libby Kopczynski Moore's mind after she helped produce an opera in Newport, just south of Usk, last year. She then decided to try staging an opera with the Kalispels, a tribe with just 345 enrolled members, who occupy a 5,000-acre reservation along the Pend Oreille River.

"I thought 'The Magic Flute' would be interesting with tribal mythology," said Kopczynski Moore, a Spokane native who's now a professional singer in New York. She called Cullooyah, who was intrigued, and the Shared Flute Project was born.

Mozart's opera is a folk tale about love, trial and honor – themes Kopczynski Moore hoped were as relevant to the Kalispels as they were to the Europeans who first heard the production in 1791.

Tribal members will add their own interpretations to the opera, part of which will be narrated in the Kalispel language by Cullooyah, with the rest in English. Some Indian musical instruments will be used.

Still, the show won't be that different from a traditional production, said music director Scott Rednour of New York.

"We still have to say words to the notes that Mozart wrote," said Rednour, an Usk native.

The one-time-only performance is free, although a donation is requested. The opera professionals are donating their time.

Much of the chorus will be made up of the tribe's Frog Island Singers, dressed in traditional Kalispel clothing.

Douglas Wunsch, a Manhattan tenor, praised the outdoor powwow grounds after warming up there last week. "The acoustics are amazing," he said.

"The Magic Flute" was written in the last year of Mozart's life, and concerns a prince on a rescue mission, the Queen of the Night, spirits and treachery, and various intrigues and seductions involving the queen's beautiful daughter and a flute with magical powers.

Kopczynski Moore runs a musical troupe in Manhattan and hopes to find corporate underwriters to bring this production to New York.

In the meantime, Cullooyah likes the idea of bringing opera out of the city.

"I used to be scared of opera," he said. "I went to one opera, and wore a tux and tails."

"This is going to be something that is talked about for years around here," he predicted.