Performing in a Time of Performancelessness
For the next couple of weeks, Arts Commons blog will be posting stories 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 other installments:
Performing Art in Strange Times
Save Our Music
A Musician’s Pandemic Awakening
Read time: Under 2 minutes.
What happens to live musicians, actors, and other live performers when they can no longer perform?
Canada is currently five months into an unprecedented cultural shutdown. There have been some small efforts to open things back up, but for the most part our theatres are closed, our musicians aren’t performing, and all large-scale events have been postponed or cancelled.
“This is an enormous cataclysm for the performing arts,” says Mark Limacher, a local composer and pianist who shared a somewhat dire video back in May speaking to the plight of our live performance musicians. His video was posted as part of JazzYYC’s annual music festival and focused on the not often highlighted perspective of the plight of performance musicians.
Since that video’s release, Mark’s views haven’t changed a whole lot, and it’s a feeling that’s shared by many of his industry colleagues. “The economic impact of COVID-19 is only just starting to be felt,” says Mark. “I have colleagues who have already quit or retired, here and abroad. All of these arts organizations are precarious to begin with, and then you add in a pandemic that closes their doors for an indeterminate period-of-time, you’re going to start losing these institutions.”
Immediately following the shutdown in March, many artists and organizations took to the internet, uploading videos, creating live steams, and pushing content out to the greater world. Though some of these efforts have been met with higher viewership numbers and media acclaim, the majority go unseen by a larger indifferent audience.
“What we’ve been seeing is that the internet is an incredibly poor alternative to a live performance experience. It defies real connection. It simply doesn’t work,” says Mark.
For artists though, simply not creating art is not an option. Mark points out that there are examples of this throughout history, where artists create, even shine, in the darkest of times. Often their art is diminished in scale or grandeur, but it still happens.
“Human beings can’t help themselves. They produce art in the most horrific of conditions,” says Mark. “The problem is, is this attempt at trying to force what it would be. What is art in a time of isolation and pandemic and obliteration of large arts institutions? I’m not sure yet. But what it won’t be is some cheap simulacrum of what we’ve just lost.”
So, if that’s the case, what form will performance art take going forward? Many artists and organizations are trying to tackle exact question, but with thousands of years of human history supporting the way we currently experience the performing arts, the answer isn’t immediately accessible.
“Opera, orchestra, ballet and theatre - those things are gone. They can’t be easily replaced. Nothing can stand in that slot. Doing something else requires confronting the unknown, and doing something else requires a lot of courage and trying radically weird new things,” says Mark. “And I don’t have a good answer for what any of that is.”
