Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 11 - safronia

17 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Upon merging into the development process for safronia , it immediately became clear to me that I was engaging a living archive in the personhood of Chicago’s inaugural Poet Laureate. Commissioned and produced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, this world premiere opera written and composed by avery r. young demanded that the role of this stage director and dramaturg extend beyond traditional boundaries. It has compelled listening as civic practice, history as breath, and music as ancestral way-showers . avery’s artistry lives at the intersection of poetry, soul- centered music, and embodied memory. His language does not sit politely on the page; it pulses. From our first conversation, it was clear that safronia would not move in a strictly linear fashion. It would spiral. It would remember. It would testify. As dramaturg, my task was not to “clarify” the work into something more familiar, but to help protect its elasticity, ensuring that its structure honored the rhythms of Black storytelling, where time bends and spirit moves. The central figures of safronia emerge not as heroine and hero in the Western operatic tradition, but as vessels — carrying lineage, rupture, migration, and the unspoken labor of survival. In our workshop phases, we more deeply embodied the Great Migration’s history and the artistic renaissance it expanded by way of the sonic lineage of gospel, blues, and house music. We asked: What does it mean for opera — an art form historically rooted in European aristocratic patronage — to hold the interiority of a Black woman shaped by the American heartland? The answer is not decorative inclusion, but rather the embodiment of structural transformation. In rehearsal, we paid close attention to breath in response to avery’s score, which demands a different muscularity from the singers, a relationship to rhythm that feels closer to sermon and cipher than to recitative. As director, I find myself inviting performers to locate the pulse of the characters beneath the notation, to feel where syncopation meets silence. We embody a pull to bend a phrase toward truth, and give permission to allow stillness to speak, permission to trust that the body remembers what the mind could never genuinely articulate fully. It is essential that the world of safronia feels inhabited, textured by both beauty and constraint. The design reflects this commitment. How does light hold memory? How does costume signal transformation without caricature? How does articulated space shift from the tactile to dreamscape without losing emotional continuity? One of the most profound aspects of developing a world premiere is witnessing the elasticity of the form itself. Opera often carries assumptions of grandeur and spectacle, but safronia insists on intimacy. Even in its most musically expansive passages, the work returns to the human scale — a mother’s hum, a whispered prayer, the weight of unspoken grief. In staging these moments, I learned repeatedly that theatrical power does not reside in volume but in precision. There remain challenges, of course. Institutional timelines can press against the organic pace required for new work. Questions of accessibility and audience expectation surfaced frequently. How do we invite longtime opera patrons into a sonic language rooted in Black expressive tradition? How do we ensure that Black audiences see themselves not as guests but as rightful inheritors of this stage? These are not peripheral considerations; they shape every absorbable choice. The rehearsal room becomes one of shared authorship. Singers offer personal stories that illuminate safronia ’s emotional landscape. As director, my role is to hold the container — keeping us aligned with the work’s spiritual center while navigating the practical demands of production. At the start, we give way to the first human voice; a quiet revolution is embedded in the gesture. A Black woman’s interior life, rendered through poetry, composition, and collective care resounds through one of the nation’s major opera houses. The stage does not feel conquered; it feels consecrated. Within my role of helping to facilitate the birth of safronia is to witness opera stretching toward a more capacious future. It affirms that the canon is not fixed, that tradition can expand without dissolving, and that new work — when nurtured with rigor and trust — can recalibrate an institution’s imagination. In the end, my participation is less about shaping a premiere and more about stewarding a becoming. safronia affirms for me that opera, at its best, is not marble. It is breath. And breath, shared in community, is how we remember that we are alive. Director’s note ‘Gonna lay these ashes down and watch them become a Star’ By Timothy Douglas