Performing from Six Feet Away - Conversations with Artists in the COVID Era

The U.S. has never been a particular friend to the arts. Art is for the wealthy and performed by the poor. It’s an odd system to say the least, and now as unemployment claims tick back over the one million mark that class contrast is even more stark.

Performing artists have been particularly vulnerable to the effects of lockdown as for the most part, their work can’t be done remotely. They are also often self employed, or contract workers, which means they aren’t necessarily eligible for the meagre relief packages that are on offer. As funding sources dry up, many wonder what they’ll be returning to once we’re all able to be within six feet of each other again.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. In conversation with various actors, dancers, and musicians, some reflected on how this time of social-distancing was a good creative reset button, or a needed rest. Others talked about a welcome chance to pursue other interests - a clown show, in one instance. Still, a prevailing theme was a sense of loss. They miss the stage, the audience.

I’ll speak for the audience and say that we, too, miss the performance. When we talk about relief checks, or unemployment benefits, it's nearly always couched in terms of being able to pay rent, or buy groceries -- but those aren’t the only necessities. To use that oft-quoted phrase, people need bread, but they must have roses too. The performers I spoke with were all very aware of our current moment and the role they as individuals, as well as their industry are playing in it -- from COVID to the Black Lives Matter protests. Below are excerpts from our conversations, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Claire Davison, Corps de Ballet at the American Ballet Theatre

At first I was staying in good ballet shape because the idea of taking three weeks off and then doing swan lake immediately was just terrifying. But then I lost momentum as things got cancelled again and again. Emotionally it’s just eye opening to me what I miss. It’s all those little moments, those shared moments with other people. I feel a tremendous sense of loss just not being in the studio.

ABT is a big company, and like other big companies we have a tremendous amount of overhead spending. Most of our income is from touring, and to not have any of that income for the year, and not have the Met season, but to already have paid all these overhead fees...that’s really scary to think about.

Arts are our economy in New York City. Broadway, ballet, museums -- the city would shut down without them. It’s the city’s responsibility to shift more funding to support them. I can’t understand the other side of taking funding away from the arts. I’ve never been able to understand it. To me it’s a no brainer.

I think if there was ever an opportunity for members of big companies like ABT to get out into the streets this would be the time. I’d love to see the dancers move outside the safety of zoom calls with our bosses and come out on the streets. It’d be a big statement. It’s good to be trying to enact change behind the scenes, but it’s also very safe. Showing our solidarity with the workforce and with the community would be huge. I’m really hopeful for the arts, for the Black Lives movement, for getting this fucking asshole delinquent out of office.

Elliott Bornemann, Actor, London

*From front to back: Elliott Bornemann as Othello, Martin Shaw as Lago. Photo credit: Carl Fletcher*

I’ve been quite heavily affected. I work for one of the major theatres in London, Front of House and so obviously I’ve not been able to work at all and I will be losing that job at the end of next month. Acting wise I’ve been able to do a few things from home but nothing I would count as substantial, so I’ve had to seek help from the government through other packages that they offer, the main one being universal credit which has existed since pre-covid so i’ve had to apply for that and get any money to stay afloat form there. And then on top of that I have a pre-existing health condition so I’ve had to be keeping myself extra protected in just day to day life as well.

When I feel I can get back to work I will need to get paid. As much as we actors are in it for the love of it, we still want to get paid and after this that's going to be even more important. I'd love to do a project that allows me to just bear my soul completely to the audience but at the same time I’m going to need to keep the roof over my head and keep food on the plate. It's kind of the same as when we would go and clap for the key workers on Thursday nights. Claps and exposure don’t pay the bills… We hope it would be up to UK theatre, or what survives of it, to not just get the big names in in order to sell their shows, but also it would be a great opportunity to go “right, this would be a great opportunity to get the majority of our industry back on its feet and hire more working class actors and help people to get back on their feet and shine through.

If we can affect change in the wider world, that will affect the film and tv industry. What's been really nice to see is people who would have said they were shocked and appalled by what happened to George Floyd are now saying “I’m no longer shocked, I'm going to learn why this continues to happen.” That for me has been the biggest positive outcome of all this.

Isaac Bates -Vinueza, Dancer at Sacramento Ballet

As a young artist, and someone who wants to continue to work in this field, I have a lot of questions about how I’m going to get these same opportunities again. When is the field going to get back on its feet? How am I going to be able to survive if I’m not able to pay my rent in two months? There's a lot of uncertainty. I feel like I'm looking into a dark foggy mist. But people who love dance always find a way to come back to it, and I think that’s true of me too.

A lot of dancers' careers, including mine, are centered in companies, and that’s just disastrous for us. I haven’t taken a proper dance class in over three months, and I don’t know a single person who has taken time off like that.To imagine not taking class for the next three months, the next six months, the next year -- that’s really hard to come back from just on a physical level.

I feel like COVID exposed a lot about how our systems don’t work, and how we might need to change what we’re doing to be more viable in the future. The Black Lives Matter movement is exposing the degree to which a lot of dance companies are really privileged and historically white institutions that aren’t inclusive to dancers of color. Even though this moment in many ways is this huge setback, I also see it as an opportunity for leaders in the arts, and me personally, to make some changes to how our companies work and how we interact with our community.

Because I don’t outwardly appear as a person of color, I have received a lot of the benefits of white privilege and that’s something that’s not lost on me. And it’s not lost on me because I do come from a mixed-race background, and I come from a family that’s very aware of the ways in which people with the same skin color as certain people in my family face different kinds of structural barriers. Being a person of color moving through this world who also receives a lot of the benefits of white privilege... it’s a hard thing for me, and something I’ve grappled with for a long time.

If dance companies want to carve out a future for themselves for the next ten, twenty, fifty years, then they can’t afford not to work on making dance a more equitable space. From either a moral standpoint or frankly a financial one. It’s hard, but I think we can do it. I also don’t think we have a choice.

Josh Youngerman, Actor, NYC

Theatre was in trouble before COVID. If Broadway plays aren’t making a lot of money they close. It's a problem with capitalism because we’re putting monetary value on a piece of art when we shouldn’t be. In a post covid era, those pressures of ‘it's gotta make a lot of money’ are going to go through the roof. There’s not going to be any room to make art that won’t make money.

We need generous arts council funding. I hate to say it, but Bloomberg did fund the arts pretty well when he was mayor. He’s horrible, terrible! But he did fund the arts in New York. You’d have to raise taxes on the rich to do so, but everyone benefits when the arts are fully funded. And more kinds of stories can be told. Besides just systemic racism and white supremacy in theatre, that's another reason why you see white dudes on stage telling white dude stories.

In Europe, there’s more of a sense of things just getting funded through the state. In the U.S., we don’t have that history so its just so fucking foreign for people. It is possible to do, but it would require cutting back on things like military budgets. It would have to be part and parcel with things like universal healthcare. The thing that’s really affecting performing artists right now particularly is that a lot of people’s healthcare is tied to union contracts. In order to get the union healthcare you need to work a certain number of hours. Those people are going to be suffering right now.

I think for me, a lot of actors and theatre performers are going to have to look at ways to reinvent the theatre medium, if we want to keep doing theatre for the next few years. I think it's going to be incredibly complicated, and a lot of working people's lives are going to be affected.

Anita Abdinezhad, Actor, NYC

I thought I was just going to be staying in California to wait this whole thing out but I ended up agreeing to do a film that brought me back to New York. I’m still making things happen while COVID is still happening. I feel like art is just as important if not more so during these times.

Theatre is made to be a communal thing. People are meant to be together in one space and literally breathe together which is so not what we should be doing right now. It’s hard. Theatre is very grandeur in all these great ways, it's big and boisterous and it’s supposed to disturb the air, but it's hard to disturb the air when the air is a computer. So I’m not a big fan of virtual theatre, and I try to do less online zoom readings.

With the whole Black Lives Matter movement happening along with COVID, that really showed the cracks in our society and BIPOC lack of representation in theatre. We have to be very cognizant and take precautions and be distant, and yet we have to also come together and unify as people of color and figure out how we can make theatre better, especially for BIPOC people. We get less representation, and because we get less representation, we get less monetary income.

The biggest issue is the lack of stories. I’m auditioning for different women of color, but I’m not auditioning enough for specifically middle eastern women. When stories for a specific group are made, and can be a self-flagellating like “this is what i’ve had to endure, this is the gravity of the situation of my life” and it tends to be more about the problems of what that group experiences instead of just living life in America and being like every other person. There's always going to be prejudice, but under more normal days, we’re just living like everyone else. We’re working, we’re eating, we’ve got gossip with friends, we’ve got problems with co-workers… It's important not only for more stories to be made for people of color, but more stories that show us like everyone else. I personally am excited for more projects to be made that show me as an Iranian woman just experiencing life in America.

Ed Valauskas, Musician, Boston

Trying to have any kind of career in the COVID world is proven to be very difficult because the entertainment industry playing live music involves being around people and we can’t really do that right now. Going forward, I’ll maybe approach things a little smarter for me, as a person in their early fifties with a young child and like do I really want to be playing five nights a week and not be around? I don’t think I really want to do that anymore.

I hope people will go out and support music. There’s tons of artists who are really fucked right not because they rely on touring and they can’t tour, and applying for unemployment as a contract worker isn’t easy. I didn’t even apply mostly because it didn’t seem like the states had their shit together and so many people I know still haven't gotten their unemployment and I’m just like… can’t they get it together a little bit for this? What are people going to do who are artists who survive off their work? I think the online stuff can only go so far. There's only so much of “dude with an acoustic guitar in their basement” that people can take after a while.

Art is essential to everyone’s happiness, whether they know it or not. Can you imagine a world without music or art? I couldn't, I’d go nuts. But our current administration doesnt give a fuck. Have those people ever listened to a fucking song in their life? Have they ever gone to a museum? You have a Vice President who goes to see Hamilton and leaves within minutes because he’s offended! Theyre such a devoid bunch of folks, and somehow theres a bunch of people in our country who dont give a fuck as long as their 401k is rocking and theyre not affected by black people being killed and poor people existing. The whole thing is so fucking gross.

The stuff we have been doing has been all very short sessions for not a lot of money and our rent is bananas and our lease is up on the recording studio, so it's like well maybe we should just shut down for a little while and not kill ourselves, but also we don't want to give up.

Claudio, Stage Name: Da TwinPrince, Recording Artist

The majority of my income was from shows because I was doing so many of them. Even when you’re doing promo you get paid for shows, and you get paid residuals for record sales, and record sales come from promo… which was all cancelled. Everything just stopped. It just stopped! No two weeks notice, they just told us it was all shut down.

Now is the opportunity for some change. We have a lot more time on our hands to do a lot more fighting. I mean we literally have all day. And you have to understand, we’ve always been going through this. It could be you, or it could be someone that you know who has been a victim of police brutality or some kind of violence. It’s so common to you, but you still have to go to work. There’s no reason why people aren’t getting justice, so we’re gonna keep fighting until they do.

I have a son, my son is eight. This stuff affects the way he grows up and how he sees certain people. I hear him say things about cops and how cops is racist, and I ask him “well, what do you know about racism”? My son is at that point where he sees a cop and he’s kinda scared. And you have to have these conversations with him.

The music industry has always been about the culture, that’s what I’ve always loved about it. The thing about culture is it speaks to the moment right now -- what needs to change, what we can do to make this change. And I think right now you’re seeing a lot more artists bringing these topics to light. Before we would talk about anything -- a lot of people were just talking about how much money they had, how many girls they bagged, being in love -- this is the everyday stuff that you do, but that’s not a part of our life right now. I’m glad that music is saying “these are the steps we can take to make that change, this is what we can do next”. You have music putting those things out there and I love it. I love it because it makes you want to do more. You’re listening to these artists saying “Let’s go marching. Let’s go protest. Let's boycott this thing”. It’s all about what kind of power you have.