Coronavirus

Furloughed Musicians and A New Digital Frontier: Performing Arts in the COVID-19 Shutdown

Artists and administrators wrestle with how to make art—and money—in the age of coronavirus.

April 27, 2020

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By Bert Cann/Woodfall/British Lion/Kobal/Shutterstock.

Go online and you’ll find them, the artists on your screen. Theaters and concert halls are dark across the globe, but in apartments and parks and empty churches, people are performing and streaming the results online. Established companies from the Metropolitan Opera to the Wooster Group have made their digital performance archives public; singers have set up YouTube channels; the Kanneh-Mason family in Britain marked their daughter’s scheduled Royal Albert Hall performance with a chamber orchestra rendering of Beethoven on Facebook. The St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, even offered a socially distanced performance of Bach’s “St. John Passion” online: a tenor soloist carrying most of the roles, a marimba and a keyboard player standing in for the orchestra, and choruses from around the world chiming in virtually for the chorales. Since Good Friday, when the performance was streamed live, it has reached nearly 350,000 people.

Is this flood of online creativity the wave of the future—or just a stopgap measure?

The COVID-19 shutdown acted like a giant hook in a nightmare vaudeville performance, yanking artists offstage without warning. Some were in rehearsals, like the performance artist Marina Abramović working on a new piece with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich; some were in previews, like Claudia Rankine’s play Help at the Shed in New York; some were in performances, including Don Giovanni, in the middle of its run at the Washington National Opera. But everyone was suddenly sent home—in the case of the Bavarian State Ballet, the police reportedly had to break up rehearsals some days after the shutdown had started—and told they were going to be out of work for the next two weeks. Make that three weeks. Make that three months. Make that, wait, 2022? Performing artists have no idea when and how they’ll be going back to work at all.

“For every organization that’s saying this is just an intermission, we’ll be back,” says Jenny Bilfield, president and CEO of Washington Performing Arts, “I think that’s magical thinking.”

“Companies are going to have to find a way to help singers stay singers,” says the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, “or it’s not going to come back.”

Yes, the arts will prevail. The arts always prevail. What was true before the shutdown remains true now: Beethoven and Balanchine and Beckett are not going away. But the shutdown has thrust another long-standing truth into sharp relief: The main problems the performing arts face today are not with the art, but with the institutions that propagate it. Now those institutions, already struggling with a declining audience, have taken a direct hit. The absence of performances, combined with the tanking economy, have threatened or eliminated their three main sources of revenue: private donations, corporate and foundation funding, and ticket sales.

Some organizations—from the Pensacola Opera, which had four mainstage performances planned this season, to the Houston Grand Opera, which typically does upwards of 40—have demonstrated goodwill during the shutdown by making an effort to pay their artists at least part of the fee they would have earned for canceled performances. Others, including some of the country’s major institutions, have not. The behemoth Metropolitan Opera furloughed nearly 1,000 full-time union employees, a spokesperson from the opera said. And the Kennedy Center did considerable damage to the image of the field as a whole by trying to furlough the entire National Symphony Orchestra without warning, only hours after the announcement of a $25 million federal stimulus check. (The musicians union claimed the move was illegal, and ultimately negotiated a pay cut instead.)

The institutions have some reason to panic, though. For even after restrictions begin to loosen and people begin venturing out, are they going to want to come into a theater or concert hall, to sit cheek by jowl with others in a crowd of hundreds or even thousands, many of them senior citizens, many of them coughing?

“Opera in general, it’s an older audience,” says Chandra McKern, executive director of the Pensacola Opera. “I think people are still going to be scared to death to go to the theater.”

In the face of a shutdown that could drag on for many months, the migration to digital platforms, already seen as a promising if distant hope, has become a stampede as institutions and individuals flood the internet with free content. And companies that have heretofore been wedded to live performance are looking at a way to create a different experience in the future. “The ubiquity of the technology has to be part of the structure,” says Bilfield.

One challenge is figuring out how to monetize the digital experience for an audience that’s bathing in a glut of free content. Another is figuring out how to create an experience that’s satisfying online, by organizations that have been trying to do this for some years already.

“People always look for the deus ex machina of the digital world,” says Deborah Borda, the president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic. “I don’t see it. I think it’s important, but you just have to return to live music.” After all, she points out, “it’s not like [streaming] is a new discovery.”

“I am a real believer in [the idea that] there is nothing like going to a live concert,” Borda continues. “My prediction is that people will very much return to the live experience.” Yet even so, she says, “I think it’s realistic, not pessimistic, to say that we will not return to what it was.”

As artists across the performing arts face months without income, not everyone is able to look on the bright side. But it’s true that both artists and administrators suddenly have time to breathe, retool their approaches, and think about new directions. (A meme has been circulating among Broadway artists that dancers and singers will be well-rested and newly fit and in much better shape when they finally do return to the stage.)

“This is a tragedy without question,” says Alex Poots, the chief executive and artistic director of the Shed, the new multipurpose performing arts space in New York. “But we have to on some level embrace the possibilities of the future rather than only regret a past that is not continuing.”

Timothy Nelson, artistic director of the In Series in Washington, D.C., which stages cutting-edge adaptations of chamber operas, has already scrapped his plans for the 2020–21 season and is going to experiment with a fully virtual season instead.

“I know there is a lot of content out there,” he wrote in an email exchange, “and even I am so sick of everyone and their guitar on Facebook. But I think folks in our industry, or live theater, are creating content that is unique—that…isn’t just a rebroadcast of the filming of a stage production. I don’t think that is interesting enough to get audiences tuned in over a long period, and most importantly won’t draw new audiences. The new forms have to help change the old ones.”

Others are also developing new digital projects. For Christopher Carter Sanderson, whose Gorilla Rep theater company has been presenting free Shakespeare plays around New York City since 1989, the shutdown is a chance to realize a long-held idea: a digital Macbeth filmed with faces in close-up, responding to the way that people interact with their iPhones. Now Sanderson is rehearsing a cast of more than 30 people on Zoom, then having them film their own lines individually, against a black background, and send them in to be edited into a full-length show. The project has been a welcome distraction and creative focus for artists sidelined by the shutdown, even drawing in some of the actors’ children in smaller roles. But it’s not only a shutdown diversion. Rather than putting it up on the internet for free, Sanderson is hoping for a distribution deal—and that it might serve as one model for the future.

“I despise the reasons it’s happening,” Sanderson says. “But God, I love the project.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that rehearsals of Abramović’s work at the Bavarian State Opera were broken up by police. In fact, it was the Bavarian State Ballet rehearsals that were reportedly raided. The article has also been updated to reflect that nearly 1,000 full-time union employees, rather than all of the Metropolitan Opera’s union employees, had been furloughed.

Anne Midgette

Royal Watch