Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 1 - Rigoletto

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 72 What is your new role here at Lyric? I’m the Audience Programs Associate. We’re working for audiences to engage with Lyric, and opera as an art form, in ways beyond just a mainstage production or a concert. That can be through pre-opera talks, where folks get an inside peek at the reasoning of the director and the composer and the artistic team as to why this piece has importance. It’s the Opera Insights series, where we talk about what makes these shows—often set in different time periods and different locales—contemporary. What makes them present and applicable to everyday life for us, even now. And the Opera in the Neighborhoods performances, where we bring performance experiences for free to young people who might not even have any concept of what a theatrical work is or what live performance is. Before that, for two seasons I was the Lyric Unlimited Coordinator. I was renting a lot of school buses—I think about 112 school buses. That is a lot. And they are really important. We talk about it with the free student dress rehearsals, and Opera in the Neighborhoods . They’re both free. But if you can’t get there, then what does it matter? We had a performance of Jason and the Argonauts [the Opera in the Neighborhoods touring production last season] in Naperville, where we had 700 students in the house for the morning performance. That ended around 11:00. Then we had another 900 coming in for the noon performance. It’s a little chaotic. Those days are always interesting! What was your path to working at Lyric? I started out being interested in music and singing in church choir. That was just something that everyone did. In high school they got me into the orchestra because they needed violinists. I initially had no plans to pursue music after high school, but my mom said, “Don’t be 40 years old, regretting a chance you didn’t take when you were 17,” so I applied to LSU’s music program and developed an interest in operatic vocal performance and music education. I ended up going more fully with the performance route, in the master’s program at Roosevelt University. I worked in the Center for Arts Leadership there, and it made me think even more about ways to reach people. Approaching music and approaching performance in different ways. When I saw the listing for the job. I remember sitting there like, Oh, my gosh, these are the things that I’m interested in . It’s meeting people where they are and trying to be accessible and inclusionary in everything that we do, as opposed to asking people to fit into our box or saying that the doors are open without putting down a runway. Any Lyric production you are particularly proud of? Fire Shut Up in My Bones . I thought it was super accessible. I showed it to other people afterwards, people with no classical music background, and someone would always say, “I didn’t know that’s what opera was.” What’s the best part of the job? One of the things I most enjoy about the work I do is that I feel we’re making sure that opera is a living art form and not just an exhibition at a museum. There’s a lot of use for museums. And I love going to the museum. But opera doesn’t have to be a piece that you look at behind a proverbial glass case, where you think “Oh, look what they used to do,” and then you exit the theater and go home. We can continue to grow and evolve, as countless other musical genres have done for decades. People of Lyric A behind-the-scenes conversation Hometown: I was born in D.C. and raised mostly right outside the city in Prince George’s County, Maryland. When did you start at Lyric? August 1, 2022. First opera you saw live: The first was The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky, during college. They were doing a production of it at either Opera Louisiana or NewOrleans Opera. It was so different because I had been loading up on videos and stuff—but hearing an operatic voice in person is wild. Favorite Chicago spot? I have a membership at the Art Institute. I’ll go sometimes after work, when they have the long summer hours, just to take a stroll. What are your other passions? I sing with the Adrian Dunn Singers. It’s a group of mostly Chicago musicians that do a mix of mostly classical and gospel. Anthony Jones Audience Programs Associate Kyle Flubacker