RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) It’s a hopeful sign that the longer we stay cooped up in our pandemic isolation, the greater our need for infusions of art and culture, the cords which bind us into a community. Happily, that need seems to be hardwired into our souls.
Like so many others, this gringo is suffering the rising frustration of not getting out there and enjoying the experience of live, not virtual culture. The dictionary helpfully defines ‘virtual’ as “almost or nearly as described, but not completely.” And there we have the problem.
It is the connective sense of community that has gone and lies at the core of live culture. Netflix or the better offerings on YouTube and the myriad other channels fail at the ‘completely’ barrier – they are ‘almost’ or ‘nearly’ the real thing, but something vital is missing.
Even live performances of music, drama, or dance, however brilliantly rendered on the stages of empty theaters and streamed to us, are missing that special feeling we get from a performance that is just there for those of us lucky to be in the same space at the same time. Only when present do we become members of a true community, witnessing a performance that will never be the same no matter how many times repeated.
Live art can happen anywhere. I’ll never forget being stopped by one of J S Bach’s haunting solos, the mournful sound played by a lone cellist on a NY street corner, hat on the ground for tips, the music touching the listeners deeply.
Isn’t it marvelous watching a brilliant juggler seated on a unicycle with a dozen gravity-defying objects in the air, demanding our rapt attention and applause while waiting for a traffic light to change?
Has it has now been more than a year since I was sitting comfortably in a small São Paulo theater enjoying one of Brazil’s artistic treasures, the marvelous singer, dancer, and violinist Antonio Nóbrega, enchant the eager audience? And has it been more than a year since I’ve seen the São Paulo Companhia de Dança perform? I miss those evenings a lot.
I miss the sense of life we feel when we get ready to go to a performance, the vibrations from stage to audience waiting for the curtain to rise, the moments we begin to engage with performers as they conjure up creative magic that makes us laugh or cry, or suck in our breath and clap our hands to thank them for transporting us away from our everyday lives and into new realms.
There is good reason to believe that however isolated and arduous our current existence, live arts will not go away, and when we are free to move about again safely, they will blossom as they always have.
The existence of 44,000-year-old cave paintings in western Europe and Indonesia – the oldest in the world – signal that despite the ruptures, revolutions, and natural disasters that appear to have plagued those millennia as they are plaguing ours, somehow our fellow creatures found the inspiration to create art and culture, to leave something behind that would hopefully live beyond their short tenure here and give their community continuity.
If this virtual year has been difficult for potential audiences like us, think what it has been like for the performing artists, the majority of whom have found themselves without work or money or the kind of daily interaction with fellow artists that fuel creativity. What was going to be ‘a couple of months of inaction’ has stretched on and on and on.
Even the most prestigious (and richest) performing organizations have had to go dark. A recent CNN special provided a depressing tour of a near-empty, shuttered Broadway, the shows which drew millions of visitors to the Big Apple have been closed until further notice if they are going to be revived at all.
Horror stories of artists financially and in some cases spiritually wiped out proliferate even as governments and some arts organizations have made modest contributions to limit the pain. But years’ worth of bookings for all kinds of artists have vanished overnight. These will never come back.
As the New York Times reported: “During the quarter ending in September, when the overall unemployment rate averaged 8.5 percent, 52 percent of actors, 55 percent of dancers and 27 percent of musicians were out of work, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. By comparison, the jobless rate was 27 percent for waiters; 19 percent for cooks; and about 13 percent for retail salespeople over the same period.”
“As the months without a paycheck wore on, Joel Noyes, a 41-year-old cellist with the Metropolitan Opera, realized that to keep making his mortgage payments, he would have to sell one of his most valuable possessions: his 19th-century Russian bow. He reluctantly switched back to the inferior one he had used as a child. “It’s kind of like if you were a racecar driver and you drove Ferraris on the Formula One circuit,” Mr. Noyes said, “and suddenly you had to get on the track in a Toyota Camry.”
If culture and the artists in NY, one of the richest art scenes globally, are suffering, I cannot dare to imagine what Brazilian artists are experiencing.
Camped out for the past months in Fortaleza, a good friend recently perfectly summed up his hopeful yet again delayed visit to São Paulo: “I just want everything open there, galleries, museums, concerts, shows, events, restaurants, and so on.”
Isn`t that what we all want, that excitement and sense of community that comes with a shared culture? When the pandemic is just yesterday’s nightmare, with luck, that’s what we’ll have again.
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