Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 4- Don Carlos

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 38 On the road again “So here’s the interesting thing,” says Elise LaBarge, a longtime teaching artist with Lyric and now Learning Programs Manager for Lyric Unlimited, Lyric Opera’s learning and creative engagement division. “ Opera in the Neighborhoods is a project that that not only connects us with our community partners, but also every corner of the company. Our artistic department is involved in casting and commissioning. Artists from the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center have often performed. There’s a marketing component, and there’s a huge technical component—a whole team dedicated to rehearsing, mounting, and moving the production.” Indeed, for most of its existence, Opera in the Neighborhoods offerings have been small-scale touring productions, specially created to be enjoyed by third through eighth graders. Over the past decade, the performances have reached well over 100,000 students. The venues have changed year to year, but in all cases they are in the neighborhoods where the students live and go to school. Though the programs have often taken place in the fall, this year they will move to the spring, says Jill LeCesne Potter, who became Lyric’s Senior Director of Learning Programs this past summer, after 18 years with the Urban Gateways arts organization. That’s in part to be sensitive to the lingering uncertainty around what’s right for individual host locations and school populations. “We’re not sure just yet how schools will feel about inviting other school populations into their buildings given the impact of the pandemic,” Potter says, “so we are limiting the number of sites this year, geographically focusing our efforts to reach as many students as possible across the city and beyond. After a series of performances at locations to be determined, the nal shows will take place in May in partnership with the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on the University of Chicago campus. The center already delivers arts programming to area schools as part of its matinee series, so the venue makes for an especially good t. Opera in the Neighborhoods revives this season, bringing works commissioned for young audiences to the places where they live. A grand scene from The Scorpions’Sting ,the 2017/18 production of Opera in the Neighborhoods, which will be remounted this spring. Michael Brosilow