ART BEAT OF CITY FINALLY PUMPIN’ AGAIN!
Live shows returning to venues large and small
Nearly a year after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted authorities to shut down performances and public gatherings, devastating the city’s arts sector, the show will go back on.
Venues from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts to a jazz stage in Queens are cautiously planning their first live programming in the brave new world of social distancing and audience size limits.
As in the rest of the country, recent weeks have seen the city’s COVID numbers gradually go down. The average positive test rate was 6.86% as of last Wednesday, according to the city Health Department, down from a peak of 9.7% on Jan. 3. While concern about new variants of the deadly virus remains high, the sense of panic that pervaded when Gov. Cuomo shut down large venues on March 13, 2020, has faded.
“It gives hope,” Jordana Leigh, senior director of artistic programming for Lincoln Center, said. “The arts are incredibly healing for our entire community. There’s a sense of rebuilding.”
Starting April 7, Lincoln Center will open 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces at its sprawling Upper West Side campus. Details are still being worked out, but in-house organizations including the
Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and New York Philharmonic are expected to perform, Leigh said.
Lincoln Center will also host groups from throughout the city, such as the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, the Harlem Arts Alliance and Korean Cultural Center New York.
The goal is to help restart the arts. The pandemic caused employment in the sector to drop more than 60% across the state last spring, according to a recent report from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
“What we’re hoping to do this year is really activate all of Lincoln Center’s outdoor spaces and to really use that as a way to revitalize the ecosystem of the performing arts,” Leigh told the Daily News.
“We really want to get artists back to work. We also want to get the infrastructure back to work — all of the union members and stagehands and all of the other many people who have been unemployed for a year,” she added.
New programming at Lincoln Center and other venues comes after the state authorized stadiums and arenas to host hundreds of fans at a time as of early last week. Big Apple movie theaters will be allowed to reopen at 25% capacity starting Friday.
The authorities have yet to ease restrictions for Broadway, concert halls or any other arts spaces. For now, the state’s
50-person limit on “nonessential” gatherings will apply to shows at Lincoln Center and everywhere else.
“We are working very closely with the city on how to navigate safety protocols,” Leigh noted.
Smaller groups are planning to take advantage of the city’s new “Open Culture” program enabling them to apply for permits to give street performances.
The undertaking is modeled on New York’s outdoor dining policy, which threw restaurants a lifeline by allowing them to serve customers on streets and sidewalks.
The Queensboro Dance Festival, which sent local folk, classical and contemporary groups on a “tour” of the borough in previous years, will apply to give three outdoor performances this summer, the festival’s executive director, Karesia Batan, told The News.
“Everyone is yearning to be outside,” she said. “There’s still issues and risks, but this opportunity ... to be in an outdoor space and to be able to enforce guidelines so that we can all safely enjoy being in each other’s presence again and feeling the energy of a live audience and being able to engage that way — that means a lot to everybody.”
The festival starts May 15 with shows that will be streamed live, followed by performances with in-person audiences later in the year, Batan said.
Veteran producers Rick Murray and Robin Schatell plan to be among the first to apply for street performance permits when the city begins accepting requests Monday. They aim to stage shows in East Harlem and on Staten Island on March 18.
Schatell noted the ability to sell tickets thanks to the “Open Culture” program is key.
“The arts groups can also charge admission, which you can’t normally do in a public space with a city permit,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to put artists back to work and also to share the arts again with the public.”
She and Murray, who run a group called OpenCultureWORKS, are also planning a performance with an indigenous people’s dance group on Earth Day, April 22.
“On March 7, I closed my last show,” said Murray. “It’s just profound to think about it having been a whole year since the last indoor performance.”
City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Queens) authored the legislation creating the “Open Culture” program to help struggling artists.
“Monday is the beginning of hope for a lot of cultural organizations and artists where this past year has been incredibly bleak and the opportunity to perform has been impossible for virtually all artists,” he said.
BRIC, a prominent local arts and media organization in Brooklyn, and Flushing Town Hall in Queens are planning to stage spring concerts onsite, but will continue to limit audiences to the virtual world.
Formerly known as Brooklyn Information & Culture, BRIC postponed its annual JazzFest featuring a mix of big names and local talent from last October to this April.
The organization hopes to “create some of that natural chemistry and energy that exists only when a band is in a room together that can’t necessarily be achieved on Zoom,” said BRIC Director of Performing Arts Lia Camille Crockett.
“We wanted to create that live experience to the greatest extent possible — thinking of it kind of like a live television special with live performances as well as prerecorded content weaving that all together,” she added.
Flushing Town Hall is planning a series of onsite, livestreamed shows with incrementally bigger groups — but not with in-person audiences, yet.
Solo artist André De Shields gave a show about the life of Frederick Douglass last Thursday. That will be followed by a jazz quartet led by vocalist Mala Waldron on March 26, then David Ostwald’s Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, a sextet, in April.
“We’re stepping this up very, very slowly,” said Flushing Town Hall Executive
Director Ellen Kodakek.
“We’ve gone over a step-to-step logistical analysis of ... not only the artists coming into the building, but the tech crew and the production crew,” she added.
Like the rest of the city, arts organizations have high hopes that there won’t be another surge of the pandemic, making bigger shows possible.
“We have hope; we do not have a magic ball,” said Leigh.
“If the weather becomes better, the vaccine starts to kick in more, we start to get closer to herd immunity, then we will move forward and we’ll incrementally move up as city and state give us permission to do,” she added.
In the meantime, leaders in the arts community are planning a commemoration of the day the music effectively died — March 13.
Organizers including Lucy Sexton, executive director of advocacy group New Yorkers for Culture & Arts, envision dance performances in all five boroughs and a social media campaign with the hashtags cultureremembers and cultureforward.
“It’s a time to say this is a sober and serious moment and we are also still here and much needed,” she told The News. “I would love to have something which gives me a sense of hope and a sense of moving forward and a sense of togetherness.”
Whenever there’s been a war for freedom, women have helped wage it. They were on the battlefield in America’s struggle for independence and the fight to free the slaves. And, they were in the streets during the French Revolution.
That their efforts were often ridiculed, or ignored, which explains why they’ve had to wage war for their equality, too.
Helping amplify their voices is “The Women’s History of the Modern World: How Radicals, Rebels, and Everywomen Revolutionized the Last 200 Years.”
It’s a tremendous job, and author Rosalind Miles rises to the challenge of the work’s scope.
Chronologically, she begins with America’s Revolutionary War and with Deborah Sampson. At 21, Sampson cut her hair, put on men’s clothes, and enlisted in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment as Robert Shirtliff, where she led reconnaissance missions and fought on the battlefield.
Shot in the groin during one skirmish, Sampson kept fighting. When she had a moment, she extracted the musket ball with a penknife and stitched up the wound. Although an Army doctor eventually discovered her ruse, Sampson continued serving until her honorable discharge in 1783.
America’s War of Independence would soon inspire French revolutionaries, with women joining in the shouts of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!”
On Oct. 5, 1789, a furious crowd of Parisian women, including clerks, courtesans and wives, marched to the Palace of Versailles. They trudged 17 miles in the rain. When they returned to the city the next day, it was with the terrified royal family in tow.
“Women were in the forward ranks of our revolution,” wrote historian François Mignet. “We should not be surprised at this, they suffered more.”
The monarchy was toppled, and a republic established. The image of the mythical Marianne — a brave, beautiful warrior — became a symbol of the new nation.
However, it was men who were still in charge.
The feminist Olympe de Gouges dared say it, too, publishing “The Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” in 1791. The Revolution had failed one-half the country’s citizens, she observed.
“Women, wake up … recognize your rights!” she implored. “Oh women, women, when will you cease to be blind?”
The men running the country were certainly watching, and they recognized a threat. They charged de Gouges with “attacking the Republic.” Her punishment? The guillotine.
Meanwhile, in the United States, women had won some rights, although it was chiefly the right to work themselves to death. They filled many of the mills the Industrial Revolution created. Some employees were as young as 3. Women’s wages were, at best, two-thirds of a man’s.
Female soldiers were soon serving in another war, too, this time a civil one. Frances Clalin Clayton, a mother of three, enlisted in the Union Army alongside her husband. When he fell in battle, she stepped over him and kept fighting.
But obtaining true equality — the right to vote, the right to control their bodies, equal pay for equal work — would prove harder to win.
The first women’s rights convention in the world was held in July 1848, in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Three hundred men and women attended. At its conclusion, 100 signed the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, a call for equality that leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton based on America’s Declaration of Independence.
“The women are coming up, blessed be God,” declared abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. “And a few of the men are coming up with them.”
Although Truth was a fiery speaker, the feminist movement was dominated by white women like Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Together, they pushed the equality agenda forward, with its central insistence on the right to vote.
They made an unbeatable team, with Stanton planning their strategy and Anthony giving the speeches.
Stanton remembered their sisterhood as: “I forged the thunderbolts. She fired them.”
Even if an official war wasn’t recognized, women were very much waging one here and around the world. And, like all wars, there were casualties. Cops beat suffragists and hauled them off to jail. Prisoners launched hunger strikes and were force-fed.
In 1913, Emily Wilding Davison, a British activist was trampled to death at a horse race. It was a horrific accident; she was trying to attach a banner for women’s voting rights to a galloping horse. Many saw it as a martyrdom. “She died