Like so much else at Lyric Opera during the last few years, the Chicago Voices project started with the company’s creative consultant, Renée Fleming.
Chicago Voices is a project of Lyric’s five-year-old outreach and educational arm, Lyric Unlimited. Like all of Lyric Unlimited’s work—which includes Millennium Park concerts, school-based programs, and, this spring, a production of Charlie Parker’s Yardbird at the Harris Theater—it’s in part a search for opera’s future audience. The days when Lyric could report more than 100 percent of tickets sold (a feat accomplished by reselling subscribers unused seats) are gone, the existing audience is aging, and younger people, with a dizzying array of entertainment options, are mostly unfamiliar with the classical repertoire.
After that, Harris says, Lyric will apply what it learned from this experiment in “putting creative control in the hands of community groups” to a new project with the Chicago Urban League. “We’ll be working with a group of African-American teens in the city to do something very similar,” she says, “which is to share their true life experiences and use those as a basis for an original piece.” v
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