Consider This from NPR - Live Performance, The Pandemic And The Domino Effect Of Dark Stages

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

The pandemic leveled live performance, and the industry is last in line for a return to normal. Musician Zoe Keating and production designer Terry Morgan describe how their work has changed with live venues nationwide shuttered for nearly a year. Venue owner Danya Frank of First Avenue and Jim Ritts of the Paramount Theatre explain why the gears of the performing arts economy are not designed for a slow return to normalcy. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

There's a famous music venue in Minneapolis. It's called First Avenue, and it's been around since the 70s. Prince used to play there a lot. The company that owns the place also owns five other venues and clubs in the Twin Cities. And in normal times, they host more than a thousand live shows a year. And for the last 11 months, we have had two. And that was a live stream. You're saying that like you can't believe it.

It's shocking when you say it like that. I actually hadn't thought about it until you asked the question. Owner Dana Frank is in the same boat as so many performing arts venues around the country. They've been more or less hibernating for 11 months. We were at around 500 employees before the shutdowns. We furloughed 98%. I think we have, you know, a handful still working to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. And Dana Frank is one of the lucky ones, able to keep paying mortgage insurance and utilities

by scraping by on grants and federal aid. But the outlook for a return to normal? I don't think anyone, you know, knows for sure. And I think anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's right now. Of course, the loss of live performance doesn't just mean little or no work for artists or a loss of connection in a time of isolation. But I think we also have to think about this deeply from an economic standpoint. Jim Ritz runs the Paramount and State Theaters in Austin, where in a normal year, his venues draw 275,000 people.

That means we drive $15 to $20 million of economic impact for those bars, for those restaurants, for those hotels, for those parking lots. We're the Venus flytrap that brings people to these areas and all the ecosystems that are supported by our industry. Consider this, theaters, music halls, nightclubs were among the first places to shut down almost a year ago, and every indication is they are last in line for a return to normal. And their loss is being felt in more ways than one. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Friday, February 5th. This message comes from NPR's sponsor, BYU Radio, with the podcast Top of Mind.

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NPR Shortwave has your back. About 10 minutes every weekday, listen and subscribe to Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Back at the start of the pandemic, Zoe Keating sat down to crunch the numbers. And last year, well, 2019, live concerts were half of my income. Keating's a cellist. She performs original compositions using computers and electronic looping to create work that sounds like this. She also composes for film, TV, and dance. And she wasn't feeling too worried last spring.

I don't know if I ever panicked. Until she had to cancel live dates in May. I did feel this sort of sense of dread. And then in August. And then the concerts in October got canceled. And I was like, wow. And those concerts were rescheduled for 2021. Now those are all in question. And if you had told me last March that I wouldn't perform again for two years, I just would not have believed it. Keating is doing all right for the time being. She's got a gig composing live music for a TV show. But she worries when things do finally open up, a lot of the places where she used to perform

won't be there anymore. You know, I'm one of those artists that, you know, I play in mid-sized venues. I'm not huge. And I am concerned that they're not going to be able to make it all the way until 2022. Keating and a lot of artists have tried to help with live streamed performances. It doesn't bring in much money. It's more about performers and venues keeping communities connected to what they do. But of course, live streaming is not the same as live. I did one concert where we had my sound person, we had a video crew, and there were six of us in this huge theater just to put on a full show and broadcast it.

And, you know, I think it went pretty well. But I was left, I didn't have that feeling of like sharing something with an audience and then sharing themselves with me. It's magic. And it's really, it's hard to recreate in a digital space. Some artists like Keating are lucky. They have other stuff to fall back on. But so many other people do not. And we're not just talking about performers. People don't realize how many behind the scenes personnel it takes to pull off, you know, a major show. Terry Morgan is a live events producer in Seattle. Truck drivers, the bus drivers, caterers, the sound guys, the light guys and the electricians, the cleanup people, the ushers, the ticket takers, the concessions people.

I mean, it goes on and on and on. Morgan says he's gotten by in the pandemic by focusing more on digital events and by slimming his staff down to just two people. Knock on wood, you know, this next two years we'll be able to recover more and get more people employed. But you're not going to just be able to jump up and get more people employed. But you're not going to just be able to jump up and be playing a 3,000 seat venue in a year. In the meantime, the performing arts industry did get some hope in December with the coronavirus relief package. Congress allocated $15 billion in grants for theater and music venues, funding that

had come to be known as the Save Our Stages Act. But some venues that already qualified for money from last year's Paycheck Protection Program may not be eligible. Certain non-commercial venues, like community theaters, which often don't pay performers, might be left out. And while the grant program is sorted, nobody has gotten any of this federal relief just yet. Bottom line, while some places will get enough help to stay afloat, that does not mean they'll be out of the water anytime soon. So if some states are opening up bars and gyms and restaurants, why are they not allowing theaters to open?

Dr. Anthony Fauci was the keynote speaker last month for an all-virtual conference of a national group called the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. An industry study shared by that group found that as of July 2020, more than half of the national performing arts workforce was out of work. So Fauci, speaking at this conference, was asked why in many states businesses and churches have been allowed to reopen in some form, while theaters have been kept closed or at highly limited capacity. The answer is that I think what the performing arts need to do is to do a little bit more of what the Germans are doing. Fauci seemed to be referring to this scientific

study from Germany, which suggested live performance can be kept relatively low risk with adequate ventilation, strict hygiene protocols, and limited capacity. But that was just one study. Fauci suggested there should be more like it, but didn't offer any specifics. He also suggested theaters look into air filtering technology. You know, there are these HEPA filters that they have in the planes. It seemed pretty clear. Fauci couldn't offer any specific solutions, just friendly advice. I bought a couple for my own house. You know, it was like $49 on Amazon.com. You know, it was not a big deal. I think if you get an industrial size one, it may cost several hundreds of dollars. You put a bunch of them in a theater,

I think you could do a test. Fauci's lack of concrete solutions revealed a harsh reality for the performing arts industry. Almost a year into the pandemic, the government still has this long list of things to worry about. Vaccines, variants, hospital capacity. Figuring out how people can safely return to live venues is not exactly near the top of the list.

We know that a lot of venues are trying to adapt. A recent industry survey found that in 2021, nearly half of U.S. venue operators plan to offer performances outdoors or at alternative sites. We also know that if and when more restrictions are limited, it's not going to happen all at once. Mask use, social distancing, and limited capacity are all likely until at least the fall, maybe longer. But the way the gears of the performing arts economy fit together, they're not exactly designed to turn slowly. I spoke about why with two of the venue runners you heard from earlier, Jim Ritz in Austin and Dana Frank in Minneapolis. You know, one of the extra challenges that our industry has

is that we are, you know, hyper-local, smallal, small businesses, mom-and-pop venues, but we rely on a national network of touring artists, an entire ecosystem. And so at First Avenue, we rely about 80% on touring artists, and they need 20 to 25 dates in order to pay for their tour. And so just opening up Minnesota doesn't really help us that much. We need 100% of the country to be opened up at 100% capacity in order to get our industry, you know, back fully on its feet. Jim, does this feel like a hiccup for the industry?

Or does this feel like lasting change, lasting damage? I'm giving you a lot of options there. I appreciate that. I would say this feels like a major coronary event. One of the problems the bands who are touring, and it's just following on what Dana was saying, is they need for there to be consistent regulations in each of the adjoining states if they're coming and doing a southwest tour they need oklahoma and arkansas and texas and new mexico and louisiana to have some semblance of the same kind of regulations because you know coming in and being able to play 25 capacity in texas but you know maybe it's 50% somewhere else. It's very hard for them to build and for us to build a business model. Yeah. I think so much of it is due to the

unpredictability. I think everybody, because of just the great expense that it costs to put up a tour, is waiting for the vaccine and for the rollout of 100% capacity of 100% of the country. When do you expect that you can be making bookings for full capacity crowds again? The billion dollar question. I'll go first. You know, I think everybody is hoping for something outdoors this summer, some partial capacity or some way to make it work. And we're certainly praying for back to full capacity as soon as close to Labor Day as possible. We're forecasting and looking at our bookings that are starting to happen for us. Same thing, sometime just after Labor Day, we're hopeful.

We don't know where patrons' heads are going to be at that point in time, which is why having the opportunity to work on these kinds of protocols become really important because I think they will still remain in place even when we reopen. So one more thing. Jim Ritz told us about a moment in his Paramount Theater, this was back in October, that really drove home the desperation so many people in the industry are feeling.

He was standing in the balcony, watching singer Ruthie Foster and her band do this blues rendition of Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. The performance was being live-streamed, save for a few staff members. The theater's 1,300 seats were empty. I fell into a ring of fire Just such artistry and emotion being played to an empty house.

I fell into a burning ring of fire I had to turn and walk out of the building because it just made me so essentially sad that this was happening and that there weren't 1,300 people whose lives were being changed by this extraordinary artist. And I literally started to tear up going,

we can't keep doing this. Thanks to Jim Ritz and the Paramount Theater in Austin for sharing the audio of that performance with us. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. Thank you. I'm Audie Cornish.