A Musician’s Pandemic Awakening
For the next couple of weeks, Arts Commons will be posting stories to the blog, speaking to performing artists in Calgary about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their lives, and how they are continuing to create art in a time when the sharing of the performing arts in its usual form is not possible. We will examine the essential role that the arts plays in our lives, and look at what the future might hold.
You can also check out previous instalments:
Performing Art in Strange Times
Performing in a Time of Performancelessness
Save Our Music
Read time: Under 3 minutes
For a touring performing artist, the most productive months of the year are mid-fall, and early spring – specifically March and April. When the COVID-19 shutdown ground all live performances to a halt, it also brought many artists’ lives to a screeching stop.
Kenna Burima, a Calgary teaching artist and live performer, considered herself among the lucky few as she was immediately able to shift her teaching practice online. But as the months of isolation wore on, she started to realize that as an artist, she couldn’t sustain her own need to be creative on recording sessions and live streams alone.
“Saying goodbye to the way you do things seems like an easy task,” says Kenna. “But there’s so much meaning that goes into the sharing and performance of that art - as a musician particularly. Dancers, actors, musicians, the types of art making and art performance that requires an audience at the time of the performance – that’s a hard thing to let go of.”
For performers and audiences alike, the sudden loss of these creative art forms has been overshadowed by the immediate needs of keeping our families safe and putting food on the table. But for so many of us, there has been a collective grief in the loss of something that we’d never really considered an essential part of our lives.
“So much of the way that I present my art and the way that I function as an artist in the public sphere is gone. And it is hard for me to come to terms with that. And I’m not the only one.”
“Even though COVID lined up with me being at this place in my process where I was still writing songs, and being in the initial creation process, when the time came to perform and I was asked to perform, I realized how important that was to me,” says Kenna. “I realized that the element of performance, of sharing in a physical presence way is a huge part of who I am as an artist.”
So, after months had passed, and Kenna was finally able to sit down and compose music again, something was different. It was something intangible that she didn’t recognize at first, but once she began playing, she realized that something fundamental had changed.
“Because of my training as an artist, I had these expectations of what my art had to be. I was gate-keeping myself,” says Kenna. “This time when I started writing, instead of doing that, instead of immediately judging what was coming out before I even put pen to paper, or my hands-on keyboard, I decided just not to judge. I would just play and see what happens. It was such a revolution for me as an” artist. It was like I’d just landed on the moon."
This was a head space that Kenna had been chasing her entire career. The ability to completely give herself up to the art. Kenna describes this as the difference between performing her music, and sharing her music.
“The music coming out of me right now is the most beautiful music I’ve ever written and I think it’s because it comes from a place of raw honesty,” says Kenna. “There’s this idea that there is something that’s so mysterious, so inexplicable, so unexplainable that happens when you share something artistic - something that I’ve created that I then get to share with someone else. I have no other word than sacred.”
Looking forward on this new, unmapped world of live art, Kenna doesn’t know what’s in the future for her and so many of her peers. Perhaps it’s the reality of becoming a seasonal artist, and performing outside with events like ArtsXpeditions, or perhaps it will be performing in a ‘new normal’ that has yet to be envisioned.
“We are actually rewriting everything right now. Art is the heart and soul of civilization. It’s what we leave behind when we’re gone, and what we dig up of past civilizations. What happens when we can’t do that? This is new. This is different. It’s a whole new world, and none of us seem to know how to navigate it.”
