Chris Jones: Recovery is coming in 2021. Will artists be off their games? Or will there be a rush of new talent and ideas?
On Monday, the Bloomberg News Service had a rather chilling headline: “Rusty Pilots Making Flying Errors Is Next Aviation Headache.”
The story set me wondering. Are we now in for a period of similarly rusty artists?
Bloomberg’s piece probed a logical dilemma as the world recovers from the pandemic in 2021. Given that fewer pilots were flying during the months of reduced demand due to COVID-19, airlines now are starting to worry that even seasoned aviation professionals will need a lot of help to get back to the requisite peak performance. Sit around too long, the reasoning goes, and you aren’t as sharp as when you do something on a daily basis. And if you’ve got peoples’ lives in your hands, there’s no room for error.
This is also true in the performing arts, as in many other fields. Any actor will tell you that the discipline of doing, say, eight shows a week at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company not only ensures that the voice and body are trained to peak condition, but the sense memory of that constant focus ensures the level of mental acuity crucial to great acting. Any orchestral musician will confirm that great classical ensembles become near-singular organisms over time, enhancing artistic unity. Those who sing or play rock, blues or whatever with others on a regular basis usually will tell you that they end up knowing their bandmates almost like they know themselves.
But what now, after all these months in the basement? It’s fine if you’re a writer who works mostly alone even in ordinary times, but what about those who make their living performing for live audiences? Are they ready to go back and start all over again?
The issue is likely to be the subject of a thousand arts stories in coming months and there are implications for arts criticism, too. You’ll be reading lots of quotes about how good, or how strange, it feels to be back in the studio or the theater or the concert hall. Many will say it feels like they had never been away. More honest folks will allow that returning to full performance rarely is easy for anyone who has lost the habit.
The pandemic has stretched on long enough that Broadway shows will not be able to treat the hiatus as a vacation from which people just snap back into action. Performers will need to re-rehearse. Lines will have to be learned again. Dancers will have to get in sync. And in many cases, given how many people have changed their lives over the last nine months, new performers will have to be integrated with those who had been working on a show for months (or years) before everything ground to a halt. That won’t be easy.
Granted, working on a show is not like flying a plane, but there still are life-or-death issues involved. A big coming worry for producers of big, complex productions, be they Taylor Swift tours or grand operas or rigs for Lollapalooza, is going to be ensuring that safety procedures have not been forgotten. There is going to have be a period of readjustment. And as the financials of the performing arts are recalibrated for whatever new reality awaits us all, investments in retraining will be have be made. Bringing people back up to speed will take resources.
None of this is to imply that performing artists have been sitting around blithely unaware of this problem. The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago was forced to cancel its live performances but the dancers mostly have been in the studios, albeit in very small groups. Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians are playing in their homes and, at least prior to the current COVID-19 wave, in occasional small groups. Actors have been working with scene partners over Zoom. Still, none of that fully replicates the performance conditions that we hope soon will come roaring back into our lives.
There’s a flip side to this issue though. Constant repetition can also lead to complacency. That seems less likely to be a danger in 2021, when public performance will have been so scarce for so long. Nothing about it will seem routine for anybody involved. And when it comes to creative work, the great pause means that a lot of artists will have had a great swath of time to generate ideas and to rehearse whatever is they do, if only in their heads.
In fact, rustiness might not the biggest story of the performing arts in 2021. It likely will be eclipsed by all the stories that will be heralding a great 2021 outpouring of ideas shaped and honed over surely the most miserable peacetime era for performing artists in living memory.
Instead of rushed, half-baked works formed when artists were trying to keep too many balls in the air, 2021 might be the year of well-rehearsed notions, of carefully considered themes, of gorgeous works allowed to marinate over the fullness of time. Crucially, there was time to discard as well as build.
So much creativity has been taking place behind a veil. Once all or most of us have had a vaccination, we’re in for a renaissance.
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(Chris Jones is chief theater critic and culture columnist for the Chicago Tribune.)
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