Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 3 - Daughter of the Regiment

71 | Lyric Opera of Chicago extends its impact with the students outside the program as well, offering resources for post-secondary options and opportunities; alums of the Empower Youth! program are already an accomplished set. Since returning to fully in-person programming following the worst of the pandemic, there has been a notable increase in both the number of participants and their commitment to the program. After 22 teens finished the program last year, applications for this year exceeded 30 well before the deadline. “I think that has a lot to do with [teens] being cooped up and not having many options to do live practice and to be around other like-minded individuals that they don’t necessarily see every single day,” Harper notes. “Another aspect of why this is so cool, and why it works, is because they get to meet different people from different schools. And they get to work with working professionals—a chance to bounce their ideas off of people who make art for a living.” Harper’s deep ties to the community make her a truly effective artist partner for Lyric Opera of Chicago. A South Side native, Harper trained locally with the Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theatre, Joel Hall, and elsewhere, and graduated from The Chicago Academy of the Arts. She danced professionally on both coasts and toured with major national acts before returning to Chicago and starting a teaching career. She currently teaches a class on hip-hop in all its facets at Harold Washington College, and for the past two decades has been the artistic director of The Happiness Club, a free performing arts education program for Chicago youths aged 8 to 18. The group has performed all over the city, including at Lollapalooza and at halftime during a Bulls game. “Happiness Club is sort of like the Mickey Mouse club,” Harper jokes. “They had stage performances and sang pop songs. They did covers. We don’t do covers, really. We create our own music and write our own songs and then we go around and perform them.” Harper first connected with Lyric for its Chicago Voices project, where her troupe was selected to perform at the Harris Theater (“One of the craziest, most amazing things I’ve ever done,” she says), and then she was invited to be part of piloting EmpowerYouth!. Several cast members of Lyric’s world premiere last season of The Factotum had studied with Harper. Perhaps most notably, one former member of The Happiness Club, Zoie Reams, was one of the principal artists in Lyric’s other world premiere last season, Proximity . Harper gave two well-received and highly personal pre-show talks for that opera. “That was a lovely, nerve- wracking thing,” she says. “It was a huge opportunity that they gave me, and I really appreciated it because it tested my limits. See, Lyric is one of those organizations that I just don’t say no to because every single time they ask me to do something, it always turns out great.” Empower Youth! seems to be one of those things— something created from the ground up that is poised for more growth. “Another reason this program continues to elevate and be successful is because we’re always looking at what we could have done better, or where we could have been more efficient,” Harper says. “Everybody involved on the Lyric staff just keeps working harder to make the program that much better for the young people. We all just keep showing up for each other, and it makes the job so easy. It does not feel like work.” Indeed, improvements planned for this new session look unusually promising. While the total engagement time for the students has not changed significantly, the cadence has evolved to a series of Saturday sessions leading up to the finale that will provide more frequent interaction with the artist mentors. This year, Empower Youth! has partnered with Kennedy-King College, which is expected to yield numerous benefits. Working in university environments goes a long way to getting students more comfortable and familiar with those settings. As much as the program is highly focused on process and collaboration, it always culminates in a performance, and this session’s schedule provides significantly more time in the university’s theater. “It’s so much fun to expose young people to the possibilities of doing art in this way. To have the support of adults who know what they’re doing is all young people need,” Harper says. “They need a door, they need the resource, they need the mentor, they need the adult to care. That’s it. And once they have that, they’re unstoppable.” Jaclyn Simpson Tanji Harper cheers on students during the nal 2022 performance.