No director, no audience, but UK’s Singletary Center still making music during COVID

A change was already in the offing at the Singletary Center for the Arts when 2019 drew to a close. But what sat in store for the venue, which had just completed its 40th year of operation, was a shift of a very different magnitude.

Last December, Michael Grice, only the second director to serve at the University of Kentucky facility, announced his retirement effective April 2020. That meant a change in leadership and, in all likelihood, programming, was at hand come springtime.

Well, guess what else made itself known in the spring?

When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the facility canceled its remaining public performances for the school year, shut down its ticketing operations and halted the search for a new director.

Now here we are, halfway through UK’s fall’s semester, and life at the Singletary is, shall we say, different. Just asked Matthew Gibson, who had served as Marketing and Ticketing Director for the facility as well as the representative that introduced many of the Singletary’s concert events from the stage.

When ticketing ceased, Gibson was moved into a new position, Director of Operations. With it came managerial duties for what has become the facility’s main means of performance in a school year where the performing arts hit a wall.

“It’s been a significant change for me,” Gibson said “Traditionally, I had managed a group of six to ten students who were my ticket associates. I don’t have that student crew anymore, because we’re not doing the ticketing operations. But my job has pivoted in a very interesting way in that this semester, I am in charge of the College of Fine Arts capture crew.”

What that means is that in lieu of public performances by the UK College of Fine Arts’ numerous School of Music ensembles, Gibson is coordinating the means of chronicling audio and video recordings of concerts with the results being presented through the College of Fine Arts’ social media channels.

“We have all these performance students and we can’t get them direct audiences,” Gibson said. “But we still need to give meaningful opportunities for them to perform and get outside of just the rehearsal environment and the rehearsal mindset. Doing these recording/capture projects this semester will help us fulfill our curricular mission and help give our students new performance opportunities.

“It also gives me and the rest of the Singletary crew some shows to work on and ways for us to be creative while continuing to support the mission of the college.”

Making the recordings, in some ways, is the easy part. The true challenge comes in the staging design of any concert in the midst of a pandemic, one that addresses the by-now familiar safety demands of masking and social distancing.

“We really had to rethink a lot of the aspects of our operations. The orchestra (the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra), in particular, has been split into two different groups this semester which rehearse at separate times and will record on separate days. We have the whole stage at the Singletary spiked with marks so we can set up different ensembles in different configurations to make sure they are all properly socially distanced. There are a whole array of color coded marks on the stage floor so that we can set, say, the Wind Symphony differently than the orchestra and make sure that everyone can still continue to come in and perform safely.”

That takes care of social distancing. But how do you go about addressing masking precautions for performance students that rely on their mouths – their open mouths – for the vocal and often instrumental demands of their music?

“A lot of our instrumental students have received custom-made masks where a mouthpiece can be inserted behind the mask that sticks out and then connects to the instrument, like for a trumpet or a horn. Other masks have slits where a reed instrument, like a saxophone, can fit. Some musicians are using face shields, as well. So the instrumentalists have been able to adapt just by getting special masks. It’s not a perfect scenario, but it’s still so much better than playing without a mask or not being able to play at all.

“The choirs and vocal students face this challenge, as well. They’ve found masks that have more of an internal frame to them, which keeps the mask out away from the singer’s mouth so that they can still execute the proper diction. This way they can still take deep breaths, but also minimize a lot of the super spreader effects that come with choral and operatic singing.”

But what of Gibson and his staff? With searches for a new Singletary director halted for the immediate future (Assistant Dean for the College of Fine Arts Belinda Rubio is serving as interim director), what does the rest of the academic year look like for the facility?

For general audiences, the main news is that, like all nearly all arts venues, the Singletary has no immediate plans to return to public performances – especially, bookings of outside artists. Beyond that, Gibson said, the return to any sense of programming normalcy is a question mark.

“It’s really hard to know, but we’re anticipating operating in a really similar way this spring, as well. Even if there is a vaccine that comes out sometime this fall, we know that there is going to be a lag before people can have mass access to it and become vaccinated. So we plan on maintaining social distancing, mask wearing and all of the current safety procedures probably through the entire spring semester.

“With Michael announcing his retirement, we were at least anticipating things changing in a pretty significant way this year. But nothing like this. To have no ticketing, no audiences… I would have never seen that coming.”

This story was originally published October 7, 2020 at 6:00 AM.