At the Henry Street Playhouse on the Lower East Side, seats are empty, but the stage is crowded. The audience has disappeared, banned due to pandemic restrictions, but since last summer the stage has been covered with hundreds of bags of food every Tuesday for stage workers, theater workers and artists to deliver to nearby housing projects and retirement homes.
Converting a theater into a pantry is just one way to respond when the audience is not admitted. NYU Skirball hosted the early voting in its lobby. New York Live Arts offered bathrooms and accessories for Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. The Brooklyn Academy of Music served its neighborhood as a distribution center for meals and hygiene products and as a training center for census workers. Closed theaters have also undergone physical maintenance, both lengthy maintenance (roofs, seats) and pandemic-inspired updates (filter systems).
But even in these places – New York theaters that present dance and help make New York a dance capital – dancing has continued: rehearsals, filming and live streams. New York Live Arts put on performances in its glass-walled lobby that can be viewed from the sidewalk outside or via live streaming. The Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens had a choreographer camp out there for a few weeks to document the experience.
But what is dance theater without an audience, even if there is dance?
Management was forced to reconsider this. And as they announced plans for spring and summer – mostly digital, with a bit of nature, and decked out in person – many New York dance hosts spoke in recent interviews about what they were up to and how the pandemic changed their business.
“People think these theaters are dark, but we’ve never worked harder,” said Craig Peterson, artistic director of the Abrons Arts Center, which also includes the Henry Street Playhouse.
Even with no box office receipts, most artists continued to pay, sometimes with no expectation of a product or performance in return. “Only do something if you want to” was a pretty common attitude from presenter to artist.
And yet about a dozen of the moderators surveyed said they would survive financially. Most of the theaters that perform dance in New York are nonprofits, and especially for the smaller theaters, the box office never made up most of their budget. The main sources of income (grants, donors) and new aid (paycheck protection program loans) have come through.
At the same time, the longstanding resistance to digital streaming, based in part on the fear of obstructing live participation, has weakened. Dance theaters have released a deluge of content online, with little or no cost – they are investing in new productions and pulling off the shelf archive material. They have significantly increased the number of people and the geographic area they can reach. What does it all mean when the theaters reopen?
Paralysis and purpose
When the theaters first closed in March, everyone was “kind of paralyzed,” Peterson said. With Abrons affiliated with Henry Street Settlement, a social assistance agency, it found a purpose early on to re-dispatch staff to help distribute food in April.
“I had all of this technical and operational staff who were suddenly out of work,” Peterson said on Tuesday as he helped load a van with food. “These are smart people who solve complex problems. They were well suited for the task. “
It’s not that Abrons gave up on art. It paid canceled artists their fees and an estimate of what they might have made from ticket sales. An Artists Community Relief Fund has been set up to provide micro-cost grants. “I keep collecting and putting money back,” said Peterson.
Looking ahead, the theater has some live performances scheduled in its small outdoor amphitheater in April and May. Still, Peterson said, “This is a moment when cultural institutions have to say, ‘We can do more. ‘”Abrons has applied to become a vaccination center and he’s calling on other theaters to do the same.
Programming a way out of purgatory
Most theaters have been paralyzed for a long time. Jay Wegman, the managing director of Skirball, spoke of the “moving goal” – repeatedly pushing back plans to reopen. This is what Aaron Mattocks, program director at Joyce Theater, called “the purgatory of the hold pattern.”
“I’ve been on the phone with the 65 planned companies for the past six months,” said Mattocks. “And every time we have different circumstances, I spend another six weeks checking in with all 65 again.”
In the midst of these scenarios, in which scenarios were created and recreated, the Joyce immersed itself in live streaming for the first time. State of Darkness, the digital program presented in October, was originally planned for a reduced personal audience.
“I kept saying, ‘Let’s wait for an audience,” said Linda Shelton, Joyce’s executive director, “but the dancers said,’ We have to dance this now. ‘”
And so, like other theaters, the Joyce had to develop its own coronavirus protocols for planning, testing and cleaning – an enormous effort and expense. However, the positive response to this program prompted the theater to present a second live stream with Pam Tanowitz Dance in December. And now Joyce goes all-in, showcasing a full virtual spring season kicking off February 18 with Ronald K. Brown / Evidence.
Still, there is some hesitation. With every livestream he plans, Mattocks said he would think, “Is this how I want to present this artist? Am I throwing something away? “
The New York City Center has been drawn into digital dance in a similar manner. Stanford Makishi, vice president of programming, said the theater had plans to showcase its popular Fall for Dance festival to a personal audience. This turned out to be impossible, so the festival was streamed online in October. It was successful enough – in terms of reviews, reach (all 50 states, dozen of countries), and artist and staff safety – to get the city center to invest in more digital dance, which will be announced soon.
“I expect this will be an integral part of our programming in the future,” said Makishi. “Especially at the beginning of the reopening, some people will be nervous and we need a digital component for them to join us.”
City Center, Joyce, Skirball, and the Brooklyn Academy have also presented – or plan to display – digital content filmed in theaters outside of New York. In these cases, the New York theater is a channel and a marketer, a link to a mailing list, and a subscriber base that trusts its selections.
“It turns out that presenters have the audience,” Shelton said. “What we somehow knew. We just don’t have the content. “
No audience, no artists?
“We can’t wait for the audience,” said Jed Wheeler, the artistic director of Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Since December, Peak has been paying prominent dance and theater companies to complete and perform new, fully produced, full-length works in its theater – for no one but staff and crew.
Cameras capture the performances, which can later be broadcast (free of charge) through a partnership with WNET All-Arts. The films are a student resource, but the main purpose, Wheeler says, is to keep artists working. “There is no audience and no income,” he said. “Does that mean we can’t have artists? No.”
(One choreographer, Emily Johnson, recently criticized Wheeler’s interactions with her in a letter posted on Medium. The university responded on its website, denying some of her characterizations.)
For Wheeler, this public-free moment offers the opportunity to rethink how “butt on your seat” controls the creative process. For Judy Hussie-Taylor, director of the Danspace project, it is a time to do “quiet work”. Danspace, who paid artists without their having to do anything, raised additional funding for videographers but focused more on conversation and “asked artists what they need instead of assuming we know,” said Hussie-Taylor .
“What we’ve taken off the table is the printing of the result,” said Brian Rogers, the chocolate factory’s artistic director. “Here is our money, here is our place, let’s do something and not think about what could become of it. Nobody can have shows and there is a nice freedom in that. “
Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of New York Live Arts, thinks differently. “I wish we were more dependent on earned income, we had more shows that make money,” he said. “Can you see a world where we are healing from Covid and actually becoming viable actors in the capitalist structure?”
Meanwhile, New York Live Arts has also donated unconditional money and experimented with digital formats to see how best to support performing artists.
“This is a long night for the soul,” said Jones, “and we have to question everything and keep moving.”
