Hope and a full calendar

When the world went into a lockdown, the world of arts and culture and entertainment moved online. The physical stage however took a beating and popular venues around the world stared at imminent closure. New York’s Metropolitan Opera for instance faces a loss of $60 million owing to Covid-19.
Closer home, performance venues in the city were all but languishing for a significant period of the lockdown.“In 2020 the months between May and September spelt death for performance spaces everywhere,” says V Ravichandar, honorary director of Bangalore International Center (BIC). “Earlier, if you were running an auditorium you hoped for big crowds to turn up.
Now, you want fewer people to turn up!” laughs Suma Sudhindra, veena artiste and former president of Chowdiah Memorial Hall. Since October when venues were allowed to accommodate half their actual capacity, the event schedule picked up at a measured pace. Now, armed with the experience of 2020, popular cultural venues in the city have new plans in place to entertain audiences and, crucially, survive.
POWERING ON
“Of the 270 days we were open last year, BIC held 255 online events including 80 podcasts,” says Ravichandar sharing data on how active the space in Domlur stayed through the lockdown. While initial months saw talks and panel discussions held over Zoom, from October, events there have taken on a hybrid avatar with them held in the physical space and streamed online simultaneously. “For the two-day Bengaluru Literature Festival, we had around 500 people at the venue and around 5000 people online,” Ravichandar informs.
“As a physical space, we will continue to be rooted where we are, but Covid has taught us that there can be possibilities beyond the physical. The possibilities of collaboration across cities and countries have the whole theatre community excited, so it was this excitement that spurred our activities,” says Arundhati Nag, co-founder and managing trustee of Ranga Shankara on the space’s busy activity calendar in 2020, which included hosting their annual theatre festival digitally, producing the AHA! Little Cloud story-telling series on YouTube, and play readings at the foyer.
GO HYBRID
Popular bookstore Atta Galatta will move into its own space in Indiranagar this year and co-founder Lakshmi Shankar is excited. “We hope to open it post-March,” says Shankar for whom the biggest eye-opening lesson from 2020 has been the access to a larger audience that the digital medium allows. “It has freed us in terms of programming. You can host an author from the US or Chennai sitting in Bengaluru and have people logging in from everywhere. My calendar for the year looks full thanks to this,” says Shankar. The way she sees it, better reach will eventually turn into better footfalls at the store. “For us, it has always been about the space, so if our online book launches motivate people to want to visit the store later, it is a winwin,” she adds.
It is going to be hybrid events all the way for Streamphony this year. The performance venue that was set up during the lockdown to enable musicians to perform and livestream their concerts found itself hosting events for corporate companies as well. “We had companies holding their virtual annual parties with us,” says co-founder Richard Andrew Dudley, recalling a recent one organized by a wellknown MNC that was simulcast to their offices in south-east Asia. “They had employees from those countries logging in to participate, which wouldn’t have happened earlier,” notes Dudley adding that the hybrid event model is here to stay. “It is the new normal,” he states.
MORE OPEN-AIR CONCERTS
The Indian Music Experience (IME) museum started the ‘Dinner under the Stars’ dining concept at their in-house café in December. “We started Dinner under the Stars taking inspiration from Museum Lates, which are theme nights held in museums across the world. Held every weekend, people could come and dine at our café with live music playing,” says museum director Manasi Prasad. The response to the event was so good that it will continue as a monthly affair now on. While she echoes everyone else’s thoughts on the online+offline nature of events going forward, Prasad says that there is a desire in people to get out of their homes. “People want to get out of their homes for new experiences and that’s where art venues win over restaurants,” she notes revealing that there are plans to hold concerts in IME’s Sound Garden this year. “We are putting our bets on open-air concerts and plan to start them after March,” she says. “I think 2021 is going to be a lot like 2020. We will all have to hang in there but also innovate in terms of programming,” Ravichandar concludes.