Taking baby steps back
MASS MOCA Saturday show to have attendance capped at 100
Next week MASS MOCA will be among the venues gradually returning to live, in-person concerts.
The music never stopped. But four months ago, as analog venues shuttered in the face of COVID-19, musicians stepped back and went virtual — performing at a digital remove for audiences on Youtube, Facebook and other platforms.
For music fans, it’s been a gift and a stopgap.
“God bless them. Thank you so much. And much of it was free and widely available, and there was this generosity of spirit,” said Joseph Thompson, director of MASS MOCA in North Adams, Mass. But such online sessions were “both necessary and insufficient,” he said, adding,
“It’s not what I crave when I crave live music.”
Next week, MASS MOCA will be among the venues and organizations gradually, hesitantly, experimentally returning to live, in-person concerts when it hosts multi-instrumentalist Treya Lam for an outdoor performance on Saturday, July 18.
“We thought it important to try it,” Thompson said.
Concerts are popping up elsewhere, too: Troy’s Rockin’ on the River starts on July 22, but it’s now limited to 50 people. Clermont State Historic Site is reimagining its Harmonies on the Hudson as a drive-in concert series set to kick off in August — and a similar vehicular approach, already in operation at the Jericho Drive-in, will also allow audiences to gather in their cars for the Lake George Music Festival Sept. 15 and 16.
According to Thompson, a dual sense of mission drives the move to in-person performances. One aim: to help performing artists who lost in-come during the shutdown. Another: to bring the joys of music to audiences starved for community and aching to gather for the live performing arts. "It's part of human nature. We're doing it. It's going to be truncated" And he knows it, won't feel normal. "No mosh pit, no dancing in the aisles. ... It's going to fix odd Some of the energy we love about going to perfor-mances — that's not going to happen. It's a bit of an experiment." he said The Lam concert will be staged in Courtyard D - MoCA's largest outdoor space, which can accom-modate 4.000 people. On July18. it will host 100 attendees max, or one-fortieth of the usual capacity.
Audience members will remain in six-by-six, mapped-out boxes in groups of four maximum. And the performers? They’ll be up in the air, literally, raised above concertgoers on a specially built stage.
The museum is adhering meticulously to Massachusetts phase three reopening guidelines, Thompson said. “We’ll be following those to a T.” As for the audience, “I have a feeling that folks coming to these performances will mask, will be distancing, and make the most of it.” The museum has uploaded a COVID courtesy code that it asks attendees to follow.
Music at MOCA will remain alfresco for now. “We have learned the coronavirus hates the outdoors. Fresh air is its worst enemy, so we’ve got a little bit of time to work with before we get closed in again for the winter,” he said.
Indoor events — “a relatively small number of micro-performances” — may return with colder weather. “But it’s summer now. We have outdoor space . . . . We had a lot of the things in place that one would need to do a very small, light-footprint performance — and even though the economics are not very compelling, we’d also made commitments to artists.”
Initially MOCA was in talks with “a couple of big bands” interested in playing back-to-back concerts, but with so few ticket buyers, the numbers didn’t make any sense. But of Lam, he said, “It’s kind of beautiful that she’s the first one.” She had been slated to perform in mid-march, “and that was the first act that we had to cancel. So it’s kind of nice.”