Cultural comeback faster than expected
Summer arts programs on the leading edge of an epic recovery
Just weeks ago, the thought around town was this would be a relatively quiet summer in Chicago. How quickly things have changed.
Just weeks ago, the working assumption around town was that this would be a relatively quiet summer in Chicago, a muted cultural season of masks, pods, social distancing and a few wellspaced (and well-tested) artists doing their far-off thing — somewhere out there in the wind.
You know, not unlike last summer, when it felt like a radical act to grab your laptop and watch a livestream in your own backyard.
My, how quickly things have changed!
In the last couple of weeks, our city and state officials have as consciously changed the narrative as they have the conversations, and announcements of Chicago’s great cultural return have been coming fast and furious.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is back at Symphony Center! The South Side Jazz Coalition with be “Jazzin’ on the Steps”! The Auditorium Theatre will present the American Ballet Theatre in Millennium Park! There will, after all, be neighborhood festivals, dance in Millennium Park, a Chicago Auto Show, a Chinatown Summer Fair, the Old Town Art Fair, shows at the Goodman and Court theaters, on and on.
The city had most all of its nonprofit arts constituencies in line like eager petitioners: As soon as the mayor spoke, they hit “send” on their summer news releases.
And let’s not forget the suburbs. Ravinia is returning, too! If you run an arts organization, you’re now
Turn to Jones, Page 3
worried about being lost in the shuffle.
“We want you back,” said Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot at the Goodman Theatre on Wednesday, praising Chicago’s world-class cultural scene (and its colossal economic impact) and striking an optimistic tone. Mark Kelly, her commissioner of cultural affairs and special events, essentially told Chicagoans that they now had a moral responsibility to support their devastated cultural sector. Kelly’s verbiage was as upbeat as a concert promoter with a big show: He used words like “break-out moment” as he outlined a variety of city programs “peppered throughout the summer,” all designed to be the leading edge of an epic recovery.
“Culture,” said Kelly, “is coming back to Chicago. Big time.”
Certainly, precautions are being taken at these events and they mostly are being held outside, a logical decision given how few COVID-19 transmissions ever have been documented as taking place in the open air (that was actually true last summer, too, beach shaming or no). But you can now see a significant shift toward empowering audience members to make their own choices: Ravinia, for example, will have two kinds of lawn seating, one in predetermined pods, the other the traditional catchas-catch-can. And the smart music festival has also figured out that late in the summer, the train will be moving even faster and it’s better to wait and announce more then.
What happened so suddenly?
The only end to this crisis always was going to be an effective vaccine, freely available and widely accepted. At some point in the last few weeks, vaccine politics in Chicago flipped from trying to secure enough doses from the federal government to persuading enough people to offer up their arms for all the magic juice sitting in Windy City storage.
In political and publichealth circles, that meant changing the message from incentivizing caution to incentivizing the rewards that awaited. Especially at the federal level, the authorities had done a poor job of emphasizing the benefits of vaccines, clearly a cause of the hesitancy, at least in part. Finally, now, carrots are in vogue.
So it was no accident that, in recent days, Chicago announced a special concert series, specifically for the vaccinated. Roll up! And roll up your sleeve!
According to Lightfoot Wednesday, the city even will offer vaccines on-site at some of the summer festivals.
New Jersey is giving its vaccine-willing citizens a complementary beer. Chicago will be using summer fun in the place of free suds.
Nothing about COVID19 precautions and policy has been consistent: Chicagoans will be to picnic on the grass at Millennium Park even as the Centers for Disease Control wants Zoom-weary kids outside at their summer camps still to sport masks. And all of the reopening excitement in Chicago and New York (where Gov. Andrew Cuomo is dropping most state restrictions even faster than Illinois officials) hardly is taking account of the still-dire international situation: Broadway tickets are going on sale even as many citizens of India are dying for the want of an adequate oxygen supply.
But COVID-19 rates in Illinois have plummeted, huge swathes of America reopened weeks or even months ago, and we’ve learned this past year that humans are remarkably adept at compartmentalization. Even in a truly global plague, most everything is local. A sympathetic Facebook post about the international situation is all most people can muster.
The other big change in Chicago involves money. The City of Chicago has made significant new investments in the cultural sector after a long, fallow period of putting priorities elsewhere (Kelly is one of the most effective holdovers from the Emanuel administration).
And although the story of how much of the federal recovery funding flowing to the city will be used for culture has yet to be written, it’s a pretty safe bet that some of those funds, too, will be a big part of the pending recovery. There will be more money flowing to the arts in Chicago, at least short-term, than ever before.
Private philanthropists and foundations — many of whom kept the sector afloat during the crisis — should be forgiven if they are breathing a sigh of relief. The city might not have been there in the worst days, but it’s now thrown all of its weight, and considerable mayoral political capital, behind the recovery.
That’s smart business, of course. The culture sector is inextricable from tourism and, especially if Kelly is allowed a head of steam, perhaps even can be harnessed to help stem the city’s population losses. The jazz in Atlanta compares not to Sweet Home Chicago. And they don’t have the Joffrey Ballet in Texas. And it’s not that difficult to support both downtown investment and arts in the neighborhoods (the schools are far more complex), hitting at least two very different political constituencies at once.
The recovery vibe has become so strong, though, that all of the meditating on permanent change wrought by COVID-19 soon will be moot.
We are not going to change the way people enter theaters, nor are we going to move significant parts of the cultural sector to Zoom. We will not be wearing masks in concert halls for long; they’re already gone to our south. In fact, those in the arts who threw all of their summer energy behind online programing now look like they’re behind the curve. Not that they could have known. Live is back.
It’s official and it’s a human reaction to being vaccinated and weary of restraint. Most of those people want to interact exactly as they did before. They just don’t want to look like they’re the tallest poppy in the field. That’s all. They know it’s time.
Here, anyway. Most people aren’t looking over there.
On Chicago’s North Side in recent days, a poster appeared in the window of an Urgent Care center: “Vaccines available,” it said. “No wait.”
The sight of that was worth pausing for a moment, just to take in those words.
Incredible.