Experimental artists are still making work - a little of it in person, much of it online.
For those of us who use the mini-season as a battery-charging period, the outlook seems grim.īut the festivals aren’t really gone, or at least not completely. But January is generally the window for avant-garde performance, when a usually marginalized fringe takes over the town. COVID setbacks on and Off Broadway will (everyone hopes) be straightened out in a few weeks, when the worst of this pandemic phase is past. Brooklyn’s Exponential Festival had already decided that it would stream its programming. The following Monday, the opera-and-music-theater festival Prototype followed suit. So on December 31, the Public Theater announced via Twitter that Under the Radar, which had been expecting to start performances on January 12, was shutting down. People kept testing positive sets couldn’t be unloaded from cartage performers couldn’t make it into the country. Late in December, New York’s experimental theater festivals were losing every battle, on every front, to Omicron. Producing a festival is like conducting a war with multiple fronts - travel visas, multiple venues, overstretched staff.
Photo: Maria Baranova/Willa Ellafair Folmar/Walter Wlodarczyk
0 kommentar(er)
