Too soon for Lolla?
6 ideas for Chicago’s summer of live entertainment
In the dizzying ride that is COVID-19 recovery, a roller coaster with gut-churning peaks and valleys, some clarity is emerging on what should and should not happen this summer in regards to gatherings of live humans for arts and entertainment in Chicago and its environs.
A summer of nothing brings too much economic ruin and depression. A summer of everything presents too much risk.
Bluntly put, we appear to be in a situation where fully vaccinated people are relatively safe from infection and unlikely to pass on the virus, although studies remain vexingly incomplete as to the latter. And, of course, the number of fully vaccinated people is increasing rapidly and many of those people are eager to resume their lives.
At the same time, though, COVID-19 cases have started to rise again and there is evidence that people are being caught up in a more infectious, and perhaps more lethal, variant.
Especially young people, who are less likely to be vaccinated.
The current situation underpinned the emotional plea Monday from Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Just please hold on a little while longer,” Walensky said in part, “so that all of those people that we all love will still be here when this pandemic ends.”
Walensky’s concerns were echoed to a large degree Wednesday by Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot, as she referenced a scary “quantum leap” in new COVID-19 cases.
Here is how the brilliant Zeynep Tufekci summed it up in The Atlantic: “We now have an unparalleled supply of astonishingly efficacious vaccines being administered at an incredible clip. If we act quickly, this surge could be merely a blip for the United States. But if we move too slowly, more people will become infected by this terrible new variant, which is acutely dangerous to those who are not yet vaccinated.”
And those people could die.
So the arts reopening question for the summer of 2021 now requires some complex and relativistic thinking outside of the oft-binary arguments around the politics of public health. Moreover, it runs up against a lot of other complicated issues, such as whether arts and entertainment venues should limit attendance to those who are two weeks beyond the completion of a vaccination program or
who can prove negative tests or the presence of antibodies.
It’s all a vexingly difficult blend of moral and practical dilemmas involving questions of equity, honesty, risk assumption and both economic and health-oriented well-being. None of this is easy or likely to please everyone.
But here are some practical suggestions for how the authorities should proceed right now:
1. It’s too soon for massive events. Perry Farrell, the co-founder of Lollapalooza, said in a recent interview that “I want there to be a Lollapalooza in some capacity so bad.” Completely understandable. But the new variant is a clear and present danger for the music festival’s youthful demographic and the mitigating factor of being outdoors now doesn’t sufficiently limit the risk. Confirming something on this scale cannot happen until vaccination rates are higher, especially for young people.
2. Events that spark partying are way more dangerous than those from which you just go home. As square as it may sound, this truth is selfevident, especially if you look at what just happened over spring break in Miami. We need to start with events that are contained in and of themselves, and that means attracting local audiences and putting a hard stop on the night.
3. It’s time to vaccinate artists and cultural professionals. The City of Chicago should follow the lead of New York City and set up and promote dedicated vaccination sites for workers in the essential cultural sector. The safe provision of live entertainment requires vaccinated performers above all else; it is due to the nature of the work, especially anything involving music. A push to vaccinate performing artists and all supporting workers is now a shrewd use of resources in service of the city’s recovery. And it’s also both a chance to show cultural professionals that their city cares about them and an opportunity to promote a sector on which many jobs depend.
4. Events only for the vaccinated are morally supportable. There is no reason why events restricted to vaccinated persons and performed by vaccinated artists should not be approved. This is not to imply that the risks thereof are zero, but they are tolerable and attendance is, of course, voluntary. The travel industry is moving rapidly toward demanding proof of vaccination. Some movement in that direction is inevitable within the arts-and-entertainment sector, at least in the short term. Vaccine passports, problematic as they be, are coming whether we like them or not. One issue there, of course, is that most people have only easily forgeable proof of their status. That’s an abiding problem and the arts will need to be part of that solution.
5. The authorities will have to allow for experiments. On the other hand, certain controlled events, such as a recent experimental indoor concert in Barcelona, will need to be embraced, if only so the authorities can see what does and doesn’t work in Chicago. And as testing technologies continue to evolve, those need to be tried out in an audience context too. Not only does the recovery need to be incremental, but some embrace of risk is inevitable. In some cases, we will have to try to know. As was the case with the vaccine.
6. The arts will need to further embrace technology and funders will have to help. In the early days of the pandemic, there was much understandable fear among producers about confronting in lobbies audience members without negative tests or with high temperature readings. However, ticketing services like SeatGeek and others are rapidly becoming more sophisticated in their ability, often app-based and similar to airline and immigration protocols, to create digital approvals of negative tests of vaccines and approve people in advance. Even small, nonprofit arts providers are going to need this technology pronto, and someone will have to help them cover the costs. Right now.
We’ll all get to the other side and soon. But in the nearer term, smart, relative thinking is a must.