By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The arts are considered the front porch of the university.
That place where the community are welcomed in to mix with students, staff, and faculty and get a taste of the talents being nurtured on campus.
Facing a semester under the cloud of the coronavirus pandemic, university personnel are busy rearranging the furniture and figuring out how they can welcome even a few guests while providing students the experience they need.
In the works is an online premiere event series, that’s still coming together, said Bill Mathis, dean of the College of Musical Arts, who leads the campus arts initiative.
The first event is tentatively set for Thursday, Oct. 1 with poet Ruth Awad. Then after that will be an offering each Thursday night for six or seven weeks. “The content and marketing are still to be worked out. “
While the series is still coming together, the culmination will be Arts X, the annual free-for-all celebration of the arts that is the antipathy of social distancing. This year it will be presented online with the various arts units offering recorded segments.
Productions are key to the education of performers.
Lesa Lockford, chair of the Department of Theatre and Film, said students are required to have production credits to graduate.
The department’s slate of productions was wiped clean, including a staging of “Pippin,” which had already been postponed in spring. “We were quite a long way into the design and construction,” she said, “so for the first time in creation we’re actually ahead on a production.”
At this point, the hope is for the musical to be presented in spring, 2021.
For this semester, Lockford wrote in email this week: “Our plans are primarily focused on ensuring that we provide production experience for our students so that they can make progress toward their degrees; production experience is required 6 times in the program. We are also doing so in as safe a way as we can, taking into account individual vulnerabilities of some of our staff, faculty, and students.”
The department must also deal with licensing issues for productions, and any music used if a production goes online.
Plans are not “firm,” she wrote – “more like Jell-O.”
Four small productions are planned, with two of them fully online and available to the broader community.
One will be a dance concert, “Dancing Outside the Lines,” directed and choreographed by Colleen Murphy with some student choreography. That’s planned for Oct. 23 and 24, “providing there are no restrictions on the rights to use the music in an online performance platform.”
The last production of the season will be a musical, “Theory of Relativity,” with music and lyrics by Adam Bartram and book by Brian Hill, directed by Michael Ellison. The musical will be filmed and streamed at the end of November.
Limited in person performances of the Elsewhere series are possible outside in a tent, Lockford said.
Using the Donnell is not possible. Given the current guidance for social distancing, the capacity would be 34 on ground floor and 28 in the balcony for a house that holds about 400.
The Faculty Cineposium, she said, will be presented using the theater in the Student Union.
At the College of Musical Arts, the New Music Festival, held in October, will be presented virtually. Mathis said that there will be three concerts of music performed by faculty, some of it already recorded, as well as an online concert by the featured ensemble Third Coast Percussion and finally a presentation by the featured guest composer Augusta Read Thomas.
Faculty recitals will be live streamed only, before no or restricted audience. The college has been live streaming these recitals for the past couple years.
Student recitals will be open to a very restricted audience of family and teachers.
Though ensembles, in smaller than usual groupings, will be rehearsing, they will not be preparing for live performances, Mathis said.
The School of Art galleries are already welcoming in viewers, masked and socially distanced, for the first of possibly three shows.
“Seen + Heard,” a multimedia exhibit by Honey Lazar, opened to the public Wednesday in the Bryan Gallery. The exhibit features the images and stories of survivors and sexual assault and abuse, including a video presentation in the Red Door Gallery, adjacent to the Bryan Gallery. That exhibit runs through Sept. 25.
After that will be an exhibit of work by Qualified Rank Faculty. The final show of the semester, said Jacqueline Nathan, the gallery director, is tentatively set as an exhibit of work of Master of Fine Arts graduates that was postponed last spring.
The gallery has altered its hours. It will be open to the public Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday, 6-8 p.m., Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1-4 p.m. Monday and Tuesday the gallery will be open for course tours only.
“The silver lining for me,” said Mathis, “ is that everyone has responded has with a roll up our sleeves and let’s tackle this problem attitude.”
The challenge has spawned new approaches, some of which will persist beyond the pandemic.
“There’s a sense of resilience, and a sense that the art and music have to continue, not only because we need it in our lives as musicians and artists, but the public, the society needs it,” he said.
“It’s an essential part of our society and culture. Obviously we’d like to have it be in person. The arts need to be in person. But it has shown us that our artistic expressions continue to unfold. It’s been interesting to watch. That process has been interesting and inspiring in many ways.”
(See related story on arts nstruction at BGSU during the pandemic.)
