COVID Entertainment: What Are We Doing?

I have worked a few live events recently around Hong Kong. As Managing Director of TheatreArtLife, I also see, hear from and read about shows, events and projects globally and how they are managing COVID. Practices in the arts and entertainment world are wide and varied, just like each country’s governments have their own polices and mandates. So, here we all are, trying to get back to live entertainment and we have this whole other “thing” we have to deal with.

Here in Hong Kong, we do what I like to call “COVID theatre” in that partitions are put up between groups of people, masks are worn and microphones are theatrically sprayed with disinfectant between speakers. I find it all quite hilarious. Not because we shouldn’t be careful, but mainly because Hong Kong has been quite impeccable at tracking and tracing cases and there’s no community transmission. And there hasn’t been for some time.

What is frustrating is that rules for theatres, event spaces, restaurants and outdoor areas are all different, yet in the event world you are going into all of these places. Each and every time an event is produced, you have to ask yourself, what kind of venue is this? What are the rules in this context and how stringent is the venue’s management in the adherence to these rules? It’s a whole other job, a whole other set of paperwork without more people or budget to do it.

I know we are all excited to work again, but I have been looking around at my colleagues and they are exhausted. What happened to that work life balance we were all so determined to have coming out of the pandemic?

Then you have the changes to the event itself. No longer do we do live events. No, we do hybrids. That means we have to please a real audience and a virtual audience. One program for the live people. One program for the virtual people. One vision mix for the live people. One vision mix for the virtual people.  In the last two events I did, I had two headsets on my head. One to talk to the live event crew and one to talk to the virtual streaming crew. Who am I saying what to now?

In one context, I was calling on one headset, the vision mix of 3 feeds going out to conference participants as well as calling a 3 camera shoot in one of those feeds to another crew two floors above me.  I mean I like a challenge….. so I won’t complain, but some situations are getting intense.

I get it. We are evolving and learning and in a growth curve, things are always going to be uncomfortable.

But I would like to encourage entertainment personnel to keep a dialogue going with the people who are hiring them. Tell them when you can’t deal with all the COVID protocols alone. Try to set some realistic expectations on what can be done in a hybrid event world. Set parameters early on, on what is possible and what is too much.

And let’s stay patient. We don’t know what we are doing in this post COVID world, but look around. No one else knows either.

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