THE SHOWS MUST GO ON
‘It’s the uncertainty that’s so challenging’
This week, the Head of Programme at St George’s Bristol charts the efforts to ensure this beloved concert venue survives the Covid crisis
Last week we were in a strange limbo, waiting to see whether the Government would ease the lockdown. They finally relaxed the rules at the end of the week, so we’ve been making plans for a redesigned autumn and spring cultural offering.
Of course, working with 20 per cent capacity isn’t viable in the long term, but in the short term it can have benefits. When you’re bound, financially, to always aim at full or near-full capacity, that rules out certain artists straight away, but when you’re aiming to fill only 100 seats, you can take a risk on really interesting but less well-known artists.
We can also focus on more local artists (such as Dizraeli and Kitty Macfarlane, presented by The Nest Collective this week in our gardens), alongside the famous ensembles who perform regularly here, such as Chineke!, the Aurora Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
The other positive thing is that this has become an opportunity for us to develop our digital content; that will surely affect the way we do things in the future. We’re also planning one or two hybrid events, meaning that they’ll take place in front of an audience, but we’re filming them for an online audience at the same time.
One great thing about our first live event last week was that we got to meet our loyal audience, who we haven’t really seen for months. We’ve been doing some research on how they feel about the lockdown, and like most venues we find they have a real hunger to get back to live events. But there’s also a need for reassurance that anything we offer will be done in a safe way. People are obviously concerned about their safety, and they want to know the details of exactly what we’re doing about Perspex screens, one-way systems, seating layouts, cleaning schedules.
For me the hardest thing about the job in the past few months has been the uncertainty. I spend the first few weeks frantically cancelling everything in the diary for the spring and rescheduling it for this autumn and next spring. Now I’m busy moving all those events for a second, sometimes third time, into later next year. My personal hunch about the way things will go is that we’ll have to continue with social distancing into next summer, maybe even into next autumn.
All this means that morale has been a bit up and down. We were very reliant on the first tranche of Arts Council emergency funding, and waiting for the decision was a very tense time. We’re now going to have to live through that all over again, with the second funding application.
Also for colleagues who are not furloughed it’s been tiring as they’ve had to multitask for their absent colleagues. Trish Brown, our director of operations, has been working on the box office, with programming enquiries and digital content, and of course her own job hasn’t stopped, because the building still has to be looked after. It’s that, plus the uncertainty that’s so challenging at the moment.
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