About this Event
Visionary and provocative opera director Yuval Sharon will hold a public conversation about his recent book, A New Philosophy of Opera, in which he argues for the need to make opera exciting to new audiences and explains how he has done so. He has a profoundly open and inclusive approach and is not afraid to turn conventions upside down — or to play operas backwards, as he did with Puccini's La Bohème at the Detroit Opera, where he served as the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director from 2020-25. He is the founder and co-artistic director of The Industry Opera, where he has explored radically new ideas, such as staging operas in unconventional settings like parking garages. Last spring, Sharon directed the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's Tristan to rave reviews in New York — high demand led them to extend the performance, a signal honor.Joining him will be his collaborators on a new production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for 2027-8. Es Devlin, who designed the set for Tristan, will continue the partnership as production manager of the Ring. She has won a Tony and two Olivier Awards among other honors (OBE, CBE) for her bold designs. Cannupa Hanska Luger, who is designing the costumes, uses Indigenous American motifs in his avant garde multimedia art practice. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and, most recently, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Surviva: A Future Ancestral Field Guide. The production's dramaturg is David Levin, the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, and the College at the University of Chicago. In addition to his academic books on staging Fritz Lang, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky, he has worked as a dramaturg at Frankfurt Opera, the Bremen Opera, the Frankfurt Ballet, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, among other venues, and is the executive editor of Opera Quarterly.
Event venue & nearby stays
University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center, 41 rue des Grands Moulins, Charenton-le-Pont, France
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.