Video: Associate Choreographer Christopher Jackson Explores The Dance in Lyric Opera's CHAMPION

In an all-new video, Associate Choreographer Christopher Jackson discusses the "gumbo" of dance found in Terence Blanchard's CHAMPION.

From samba to solid gold, take a peek inside the rehearsal room as dancers bring award-winning choreographer Camille A. Brown's vision to life.

Lyric Opera of Chicago is presenting the Lyric premiere of Grammy Award-winning composer Terence Blanchard and Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning librettist Michael Cristofer’s knockout opera Champion, on stage January 27 to February 11, 2024.

An "opera in jazz," Champion marks Music Director Enrique Mazzola’s first contemporary opera at Lyric. Audiences were profoundly moved by Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones in the 2021/22 Season and, using the boxing ring as a lens, Champion explores similarly operatic issues of race, sexuality, and self-discovery.

Grammy Award-winning composer Terence Blanchard, whose Fire Shut Up in My Bones was a smash hit in Lyric’s 2021/22 Season, uses jazz as the basis for a cinematic and groundbreaking score — his first for opera — filled with bluesy harmonies and Afro-Caribbean beats. A four-piece jazz combo will be embedded into the Lyric Opera Orchestra, allowing Blanchard’s jazz-infused score to shine. The libretto of Michael Cristofer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play for The Shadow Box, ably shifts through a number of time periods to bring the many facets of Emile — his boxing career, his sexuality, his hopes and dreams as an American immigrant — to powerful life on the opera stage.

Champion is directed by James Robinson, who directed the opera at its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2013, at Washington National Opera in 2017, and again in its revised version, in a co-production with Lyric, at the Metropolitan Opera in April 2023. Robinson previously co-directed Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones in Lyric’s 2021/22 Season. The production team for Champion includes set designer Allen Moyer, costume designer Montana Levi Blanco (a recent Tony Award winner for The Skin of Our Teeth) in his Lyric debut, two-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Donald Holder, and projection designer Greg Emetaz.

Choreographer Camille A. Brown returns to Lyric following her debut as co-director and choreographer of the 2021/22 Season’sFire Shut Up in My Bones, for which she created unforgettable dance sequences that drove the story of the opera forward. Brown’s 14 dancers will do similar storytelling work in Champion. Boxing consultant David Ortiz, Jr., co-owner of Logan Square’s Barracks Boxing Club, will help bring authenticity to the opera’s many boxing scenes. More than 40 artists, including members of the Lyric Opera Chorus, take the stage in various guises as factory workers, boxers, drag queens, and more.
 

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