HOW COVID HAS IMPACTED THE ARTS.
After 4½ months at home in lockdown, guitarist Brandon Scott began working at a COVID testing site in Vancouver.
He got the job — he calls it a “gig” — through a friend who works at Fraser Health Authority. Partly it was for the money, but it was also a chance to stay active.
As a full-time musician, non-stop touring had been his life as the guitarist for Vancouver-based road warriors Yukon Blonde. Aside from a short breather in 2013, the band had been on that indie-band treadmill since 2010: recording six albums, criss-crossing Canada and the U.S., making jaunts into Europe and Japan. All of that came to a crashing halt in mid-March of 2020.
“It's pretty weird to just be standing still, to the point where you can't even jam with the band anymore,” says Scott, in an interview with Postmedia from Vancouver while on a break from his job. “It's pretty heartbreaking.”
Even as an indie band with a global reach, Yukon Blonde's finances are largely dependent on revenue made on the road. As of March 2020, those revenues have been zero.
“If you're not playing festivals, that's a huge financial crunch,” Scott says. “It impacted us massively as the band as a business.”
As with almost everyone involved in Canada's arts sector, COVID-19 has done much more than temporarily disrupt momentum and finances for the band. It has cast a pall of uncertainty over them.
“It's definitely caused a lot of anxiety,” Scott says. “Especially for our team. You can't really do any planning. It just crushes more hopes and dreams when you say, `OK, we'll plan to do it in the spring' and then you have to cancel it anyway.”
The pandemic has had a devastating impact across the board for the arts sector. Performers and the technical workers who support them have remained unemployed. Art galleries and museums have been temporarily shuttered. For-profit live venues have been particularly hard hit, especially those that cater to touring acts, including cancellations of major music and arts festivals.
These cancellations obviously had a trickle-down effect on the musicians, actors, dancers, technicians and others who rely on these gigs. The related numbers were staggering. A December report released by the Canadian Independent Music Association showed a 79 per cent drop in income from 2019 for the live sector; a 41 per cent decline in revenue for independent sound recording and publishing companies and 2,000 fulltime-equivalent jobs lost in the first six months of the pandemic. Last year, the Canadian Live Music Association reported that 64 per cent of music venues across Canada were at risk of closing. Citing numbers from Statistics Canada, the Canadian Association for the Performing Arts reported that 114,400 arts, entertainment and recreation workers — that includes artists, technicians, marketing staff and administrators, among others — lost their jobs in 2020.
In its April budget, the federal government seemed to respond to specific needs. It included the establishment of a $300-million recovery fund for heritage, arts, culture and sports sectors; $200 million to support major festivals; another $200 million for local festivals, community cultural events, local museums and outdoor theatre events; $70 million over three years to help musicians, concert venues, producers and distributors and $15 million in new funding to help upgrade arts and heritage organizations to meet public health guidelines.
More than a year into the pandemic, arts organizations big and small continue to face uncertainties.
“There's not really a hook that you can hang your hat on,” says Patti Pon, CEO and president of Calgary Arts Development. “Even when we talk about some shortterm solutions, then we hit a third wave of the pandemic and everything shuts down again.”
Calgary Arts Development delivers grants to 169 organizations and hundreds of artists. Early on in the pandemic, it sent surveys to artists and arts groups asking for information about the immediate economic impact of COVID-19. The results were predictably grim, with nearly half of those surveyed saying they would run out of money by the end of 2020.
While it never got that dire in Calgary, the impact was immense. Calgary Arts Development is accepting applications for The Organization Structural Change Grant, which it established in February to help arts groups looking to merge, drastically restructure or close for good.
Pon says non-profit arts groups alone contribute $54 billion to the Canadian economy and GDP, which doesn't even factor in music, film, television and publishing on the private-sector side. Beyond the often-overlooked economic contributions, there is the significant social aspect of the arts, not only in helping us cope during the dark days, but also to record them for posterity.
“Writers are now writing about what is happening to us, they are the storytellers of our time,” Pon says. “This time will be remembered because of artists.”
Which brings up a broader question: What impact will these months of uncertainty, fear, isolation and dread have on the sort of art being created?
In the past, history-altering, traumatic shared experiences such as the First and Second World Wars or the Great Depression tended to seep into the work produced by generations of artists. Think of the post-First World War trends found in the “lost generation” accounts from Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the glitzy, absurdly elaborate Hollywood distractions from choreographer Busby Berkeley during the Great Depression; or the emergence of the paranoid, shadow-filled world of film noir that flourished throughout and directly after the Second World War.
COVID-19 has already impacted the sort of non-fiction books being written and published, whether they be dispatches from the front lines such as Gavin Francis's Intensive Care: A GP, A Community and COVID-19 and Canadian journalist Ethan Lou's Field Notes from a Pandemic, or sociological studies such as Lauren McKeon's Women of the Pandemic.
Jared Bland, publisher of McClelland & Stewart, says there has been clear evidence of COVID's impact on the sort of submissions being received in the non-fiction realm. There is an uptick in pitches of non-fiction titles about virology or disease history, for instance.
“There will be meaningful journalism and non-fiction work to be done about the role of government, the failures of various institutions and that sort of thing,” he says. “But the fiction question is interesting to me.”
It's also much harder to predict.
“If you think about a seismic global event like a world war, I think you can see phase after phase after phase of ways in which (they) influence artistic creation,” Bland says. “There's always an immediate reckoning with it, there's a distanced reckoning of it, there's an understanding of the intergenerational effects, the broader sociological impact. There's a million ways it could go. How will they choose to address (COVID)?
“There are a lot of amazing books written about war in which a battle scene never appears and a war is never mentioned. So I think we'll be seeing really creative ways of engaging with the sort of shift in the world that's happened in the past two years.”
What makes the next wave of art and artists even more interesting is that COVID came along as a number of social movements were emerging: #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Truth and Reconciliation, climate activism. COVID shut down the world and gave artists and everyone else ample pause to reflect on transformational movements, says Christine Brubaker, a playwright and assistant professor in drama at the University of Calgary. She thinks spending months locked down in our respective communities will have theatres, arts organizations, artists and audiences thinking more about place and community.
“We are going to continue on this journey of identity and understanding ourselves in relationship to others,” she says. “I think it's isolation, but also it's about connection. Stories of connection in places of adversity, I would not be surprised if that starts to emerge.
“This idea of being placebased is not just economics; it's about understanding oneself inside of a locale. `Where do I live? Where am I?' I think that's going to be a fairly major and potent question, because it's one we've all had to ask. We've all been grounded.”
FROM CALGARY, ERIC VOLMERS
EXPLAINS HOW ONE YEAR AND COUNTING OF COVID-19 AND LOCKDOWNS HAS IMPACTED THE ARTS