When it comes to dangerous pursuits, researching the background to a new opera production would probably come at the bottom of the list. But what if the opera you are about to direct is set in Haiti, an island made infamous through tales of voodoo and zombies, and whose capital, Port-au-Prince, is one of the most violent cities in the world? Do you restrict yourself to a cosy desk in the British Library, or do you scout locations?

If you are Cathie Boyd, the director of An Ocean of Rain, a new opera by the Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides that will open the Aldeburgh Festival next month, there was only one choice. “I knew that if I could go to Haiti, I would,” says Boyd of her solo research trip to the island to explore the background to the libretto by Daniel Danis, the Canadian poet.

The aim was to find the real-life orphanage in which Danis had based his uncompromising story, with its allusions to child prostitution and rape as well as his own experiences of the Asian tsunami in 2004, but it was no small decision. In Haiti, gang culture is endemic and the risk of kidnapping high. The Foreign Office advises against all travel, despite the presence of UN peacekeepers.

“I knew it was dangerous,” Boyd says. “I grew up in Belfast in the Troubles so I was used to men with guns, but Haiti really made me think. I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, given that I already stood out as a white foreign woman. I was there only five days, but you attract attention almost immediately – and how long does a kidnapping take?”

Boyd almost found out when she attended a voodoo ceremony. For those whose knowledge of Haiti begins and ends with images of the actress Jane Seymour in red Spandex running away from a masked man wielding a skull full of drugged chicken blood – James Bond has much to answer for – the idea of attending a voodoo ceremony is about as tempting as, well, donning red Spandex. But Boyd is nothing if not thorough.

“Getting to a voodoo ceremony was almost impossible to arrange,” says Boyd, who felt it was important to experience this aspect of the country’s religious culture. “People are suspicious, but I managed to persuade my guide that I was there for the right reasons. It was one of the highlights of my life.”

Boyd stood in the crowd as chickens were ritually slaughtered and members of the audience went into a trance. “I had to take part,” she says, “but I tried to drink as little as possible because I was attracting attention. There was a group of men who were interested, and I was very aware that I could be part of the next day’s headlines; that I could simply disappear.”

An Ocean of Rain was conceived around the question, posed by Boyd, of what happens to us after death. In the organised chaos of the Almeida Theatre’s rehearsal room, as the all-female cast takes a tea break, Boyd points at a wall of research, pages of information about life and death, from an arresting picture of the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo to snapshots Boyd took of street life in Haiti; from academic essays on voodoo to stories of zombies. “In Haiti you hear stories of people being given a drug that makes them appear dead before they are brought back from the grave and set to work as slaves. The graves have locks on them so the dead can’t come back. Standing in a graveyard was an extremely disturbing experience.”

It is not, perhaps, the stuff of your average opera libretto, but the potential for sensationalism is neutered by the surprisingly traditional bent of the themes in Danis’s spare and occasionally lyrical libretto.

Basing the fictional orphanage on his own experiences at the age of 18 as a volunteer in a centre outside Port-au-Prince, Danis’s story combines a trio of Western women volunteers, each with the her own secrets, and an orphanage matron who sees her duty more to protect than to love. The central character is a young Haitian orphan, Kiev, prostituted by her husband and implicated in the murder of an American sex tourist.

“It was almost impossible to find the orphanage,” says Boyd, who arrived in Haiti with instructions from Danis to find “a white building on a hill behind Port-au-Prince”.

“In the text there is very much a sense of the girls protected inside the orphanage gate, and of Kiev, the ‘fallen’ orphan, being outside the gate, desperate to get back in. I was incredibly moved to see this gate there, in the yard, just as Danis described. The people walk tall here, despite their struggles, but it really brought home the reality.”

Kyriakides’s score contains reflections of Haitian traditional music and Christian missionary music amid his own highly developed integration of electronics, miked singers and a central role that is entirely spoken. Indeed, it is this aspect that, for some opera-going stalwarts, will be far more controversial than any reference to voodoo or zombies.

“I’m not entirely sure it is opera, although I don’t like getting hung up on definitions,” says Jonathan Reekie, the Aldeburgh chief executive. “It’s certainly not a typical Aldeburgh opera. I’m sure a good portion [of the audience] will think it’s more music theatre.”

Whether this matters is moot, but Boyd, whose Glasgow-based theatre company Cryptic is co-producing the show alongside Aldeburgh and Almeida Opera, is certain that it is opera – and Kyriakides is adamant that it is. Opera is, after all, an art-form that encompasses all other art-forms. It’s just that in the 21st century the cross-media means of expression has evolved. And so, too, Boyd hopes, have audiences.

An Ocean of Rain, June 13 at Snape Maltings Concert Hall (01728 687110) and July 10, 11 and 13 at the Almeida, London N1 (020-7359 4404)

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