Coronavirus shutdowns: Arts forced to think outside the box
Reaching audiences has moved into a virtual realm as the arts struggle to survive the onslaught of coronavirus shutdowns.
In the beginning it felt a little naughty, prurient even. The uneasy friction, the frivolous skirmishes, the idiosyncratic toilet rituals and of course the flesh. So much flesh. It was April 2001 and Australians were dialling into a new paradigm of evanescent entertainment by the millions: reality television. Big Brother had taken Orwell’s masterful dystopian parable and microwaved it into a doltish slush of voyeuristic poppycock, and Australians were eagerly spooning it up alongside their nachos.
In a seemingly perverse plot twist, millions of Australians — along with the rest of our fellow human brethren — now find ourselves cast deep into a narrative that marries the most implausible parts of Big Brother (home quarantine) with a D-grade Hollywood potboiler (super virus). But this is no light entertainment: it’s the gravest social upheaval in generations, and the world is anxiously hooked into the ever-capricious plotline via our flittering smartphone screens.
As Australians grew to accept, even embrace, reality television so we will now need to adapt to a radically recalibrated cultural landscape with cinemas, concert halls, pubs and bookshops shuttering to comply with emergency measures in an attempt to combat COVID-19.
The creative industries were the first to feel the blow, as radical laws on social gathering came into abrupt effect. And the arts will very likely be the last industry to recover, as those who survive the cataclysmic decimation of the sector attempt to putty back the shards. What’s certain in the ominous spectre of uncertainty is that the arts industries will be forever changed: companies will collapse, arts workers forced onto welfare queues, projects spiked and the landscape wholly razed.
Twenty-six million tickets were sold to live performance arts events in Australia during the 2018 calendar year; in 2020 the entire industry has toppled off the precipice. For many it will hereafter become known as the lost year.
While unanimously calling for a dedicated emergency package from the federal government (the Australia Council announced this week it would scrap grant programs and repurpose $5 million to the cultural sector), many arts organisations have been quick to respond to the “new normal”: retreating to their social media channels to disseminate unique content to audiences, albeit more as a gesture of hope than a newly minted revenue stream.
Within days of the first wave of social distancing measures the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra broadcast its scheduled performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade live via its YouTube channel, filmed in an eerily desolate Hamer Hall. Although coincidental, Scheherazade was a felicitous and galvanising statement: itself inspired by the story of the heroine of One Thousand and One Nights, who wards off certain death at the hand of the tyrannic Shahryar by the telling of stories. An accidental prophesy — that art will keep our spirits extant in the penumbra of doom — the performance received a staggering 75,000 views in just one week.
The MSO had only recently commenced the implementation of a four-year strategy to wrench the 115-year-old institution into the virtual age — a program that will now be expedited as the orchestra grapples with the inconvenient hitch that it can no longer perform as a full orchestra without breaking the law. One pillar of the digital strategy is to employ technologies that allow smaller sections of the orchestra to perform simultaneously, have this mixed in real time and broadcast as a fully immersive live experience online. In the short term, the orchestra had pre-empted venue closures and more severe social distancing measures and hastily filmed a number of performances last week, with plans to release them successively via YouTube, interspersed with archival material.
“I feel like I‘m driving a car and I don’t have headlights and I am not sure how much petrol I have in the tank,” the orchestra’s managing director, Sophie Galaise, declares from her home office quarantine in Melbourne. “It’s quite a situation but we will try to readjust and make do. (These online concerts) are a beacon of light and hope to people around the country and world. The power of music is gigantic — it helps the soul, it helps heal. We’ll keep the music going. That’s our mission, our shared purpose at the MSO.”
Orchestras and opera companies across the country have rapidly moved to better exploit their social media channels, and art galleries and institutions such as MONA in Hobart and the Sydney Biennale have swiftly assembled online experiences to keep their collections accessible and audiences engaged.
Live music will be particularly battered by the growing tempest as gigs are cancelled wholesale across the globe. Just a decade ago album sales could have helped mitigate the loss, but as streaming has devalued the album as a sellable product live concerts have become, for most, the solitary income source. Consumers have been encouraged to defer seeking any ticket refunds for cancelled shows and to also purchase official merchandise direct from their favourite artists.
Reciprocally, musicians are fashioning unique online content, including last weekend’s Isol-Aid concert, which brought together 74 Australian acts in a synchronised livestream festival espousing the importance of social distancing. The festival attracted thousands of audience members and raised funds for Support Act, an organisation providing crisis support for music industry workers.
The biggest beneficiaries of the carnage wreaked by COVID-19 to the entertainment sector will undoubtedly be streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix, as consumers batten down the hatches to see out the looming winter months: although both companies have yet to make any clear signals as to whether they will offer greater support to Australian artists or increase royalty percentages to help soften the potentially fatal blow. Indeed just days ago this writer received a notification from Netflix inviting him to “relive the best moments from the titles you’ve watched”, such as The Crown: the streaming behemoth’s automated email feels somewhat clumsy at a time when the contemporary Australian film industry is squinting into the abyss.
Scheduled for wide theatrical release in May, the Australian film Rams has found itself at the kernel of the COVID-19 storm. Directed by Jeremy Sims and starring Sam Neill, Michael Caton and Miranda Richardson, the film’s plotline is staggeringly uncanny: two estranged sheep-farming brothers, a mysterious new virus threatening to ruin their remote Australian town, and the triumph of hope and community over adversity.
While the film’s Australian distributor, Village Roadshow, is likely to wait out the Australian shutdown and release the film theatrically when cinemas finally crack the shutters, the film’s producer, Aidan O’Bryan, suggests many Australian films may prove less fortunate — with many spiked or sold off in fire sales to streaming services. Netflix is somewhat exiguous when it comes to Australian content, so for many local films that have had their theatrical releases aborted it would appear a natural marriage: although many higher-budget films will instead look to iTunes to attempt to maximise their “pay for play” revenue before moving on to streaming.
Similarly, some films are likely to turn up on free-to-air TV — where networks will be scrambling to fill prime programming slots vacated by a staggering suite of cancelled major sporting events. What’s certain is consumers will be demanding more content, and this may prove an opportunity for less prominent Australian content otherwise destined to be buried in the tangled rabbit warrens of the digital ether.
While O’Bryan admits the landscape looks bleak for the Australian film industry, the upheaval will also reconfigure the sort of film and television Australians consume.
“The art may not change but the audience’s perception of it and engagement with it will,” he suggests. “There have always been people making interesting and thoughtful content about humanity and the human condition and relationships and society, but what people might experience now is that the content they consume no longer reflects the new depth they are experiencing in reality. Perhaps things liked Married At First Sight will suddenly start to look a little vacant.”
The ABC and SBS have both provided statements to Review outlining their plans to escalate the promotion of Australian content to help fortify the local industry. The ABC has further canvassed plans to steadily increase the quota of Australian content playlisted on its radio properties including Triple J, while ABC Classic will escalate its collaborations with Australian orchestras.
While the mediums of film and music are congenitally compatible with streaming, theatre is by definition antonymous. While contemporary theatre employs sophisticated technologies, the industry has maintained an unchanged business model for hundreds of years: open the doors, sell tickets, put on a show. While progressive theatre companies such as The Last Great Hunt in Perth are already exploring new paradigms — coincidently developing a show for one audience member and also collaborating with Audio Play to create immersive theatrical experiences audiences can download and consume at home — the indiscriminate cancellation of shows has devastated the industry.
The closure of the 183-year-old Theatre Royal in Hobart last week was a particularly symbolic blow: Australia’s oldest consecutively running theatre, and one that has weathered war, fire, Netflix and even the Spanish flu.
“When the Spanish flu hit in 1919 we were already 84 years old at that point and survived,” Theatre Royal CEO Tim Munro says. “There is something about endurance: I like to say we’ve been a contemporary theatre for 183 years. Listen, there are no upsides — and for me to say so would be a touch Pollyanna-ish. But people will look at what creativity is available at the moment and get to it. Nothing can outweigh the losses, but we’re looking at all the little opportunities.
“Storytelling is vital,” Munro continues, as the nation’s theatres cast a solitary light upon their stages as a unifying symbol of hope. “Storytelling is what we do, and those things just change their forms. A theatre is the town bonfire where people gather to tell stories. This will still happen, just the gatherings will be smaller, the stories more local and we just need to work out how we go about it.”
Stories are indeed what bind us: the epoxy that welds our cultural DNA as a people. And no two themes have informed the post-settlement Australian narrative quite as pervasively as adversity and isolation. It’s there in The Drover’s Wife. It’s there in Voss. It’s there in Khe Sanh. As Tim Winton wrote perhaps all too portentously in his 2008 novel, Breath: “Being afraid proves you’re alive.”
“What can we do but write?” acclaimed Australian author Laura Elizabeth Woollett asks contemplatively down the line from Melbourne. “It’s all I know.” While Woollett’s upcoming novel, The Newcomer — a story of trauma and isolation on Australia’s remotest outpost, Norfolk Island — is not released until May 2021, the local publishing industry has been immediately throttled with the cancellation of key writers’ festivals and bookstore closures in recent days.
And as readers likely find themselves with a few unengaged hours in the coming months, they are encouraged to purchase through their local bookshop — many of which are now offering free delivery. Woollett has compiled an essential lockdown list of new Australian literature: including Lucia Osborne-Crowley (I Choose Elena), Sophie Hardcastle (Below Deck), Victoria Hannan (Kokomo), Ellena Savage (Blueberries) and Laura Jean McKay (The Animals in that Country).
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“The arts is inherently collaborative,” the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s managing director and president of Live Performance Australia, Richard Evans, concludes, declaring that if the government doesn’t intervene in the next fortnight up to two- thirds of the industry will be obliterated. “It’s people coming together. The arts is the lifeblood of Australian culture. We are at the very beginning of this. We have many, many months to go and I am sure we’re going to see many inventive ways of artists interacting with fanbases. Disasters can reveal aspects of the human spirit that we don’t see in our usual day to day lives. Art tells the true story.”