‘Facing really hard times:’ Will Lexington art groups survive the COVID pandemic?

Battered by a disastrous pandemic slowdown, Lexington’s arts organizations are cautiously beginning to envision life after the coronavirus.

But with COVID-19 cases and deaths still dangerously high and the vaccine roll-out still in early stages, it’s unlikely that Central Kentucky’s arts patrons will have much to choose from until late spring or summer at the earliest, and perhaps not even until the fall.

“I know that we’re going to come back, but I cannot tell you when,” says Lexington Ballet artistic director Luis Dominguez. Adds Lyndy Franklin Smith, artistic director of Lexington Theatre Company, “We’re looking to get back to producing theater, but we’re definitely going to wait until it’s absolutely safe to do so.”

In the meantime, local arts organizations remain mostly hunkered down in a wait-and-see crouch, getting by on shoestring budgets of less than half the size of the previous year, prompting staff furloughs, pay cuts and almost no hiring of part-time contract employees such as orchestra players, dancers, actors and stage designers.

The Lexington Philharmonic, for example, is operating on a budget of about $540,000, compared to the previous fiscal year’s $1.2 million, with its staff working for about half its normal compensation.

Lexington Children’s Theatre’s budget shrank from $1.25 million to $478,000, and its staff, which typically swells to as many as 35 to 40 theater artists at various points of the year, has rarely exceeded the core staff of 15 — most of whom are working about 30 hours a week, the minimum required to maintain their health insurance.

Still, groups that have made do with small-scale alternative programming (most of it online) are beginning to plan their first forays into the post-Coronavirus era, uncertain of when that might arrive but itching to get back into action.

For example, LCT’s new producing artistic director, Jeremy Kisling, is considering an outdoor production sometime this spring or early summer, possibly a site-specific adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” in which various scenes would be performed at different locations along a path. Another possibility he’s thinking of proposing: a theater festival this summer in which LCT and other companies would give small-scale performances at an outdoor venue such as Moondance Amphitheater in the Beaumont neighborhood.

“We’ll survive this pandemic,” Kisling says. “It’s just a matter of how.”

And when. That’s perhaps the biggest question bedeviling Lexington arts groups at the moment: When will it be safe to bring performers and audiences together, and where, and at what scale?

“That’s the moving target that we’re all trying to hit, but there are no clear answers,” says Wesley Nelson, executive director of Distilled Theatre Company. They are currently weighing the potential pros and cons of producing its Broadway Under the Stars event at Woodland Park this summer, which typically costs between $40,000 and $50,000 to stage.

“We have to consider not only the safety of performers and audiences, but also the financial aspect of it,” says Nelson, who is forgoing taking a salary during the pandemic. “With social distancing, we have to weigh the budget, which includes building a stage, against potential audience size. Yes, we want to stay relevant and reach our audience, but at the same time, we have to be financially responsible so that when it is safe to return, we’ll still be here.”

The Philharmonic is looking to continue offering outdoor concerts this spring in neighborhoods throughout the city, as it did last fall at the Loudon House and elsewhere. “People absolutely celebrated those concerts in their neighborhoods as moments of joy and relief during the pandemic,” says Allison Kaiser, the orchestra’s executive director. “We definitely plan to do more of those.”

And because its primary venue, the Singletary Center for the Arts at the University of Kentucky, remains closed for large-scale performances for the foreseeable future, the Philharmonic is also searching for temporary venues for smaller-scale indoor concerts, possibly including churches, warehouses and airplane hangars.

“We’re looking at multiple scenarios because there are so many variables,” Kaiser says. “It’s very difficult because we don’t know how quickly the vaccine rollout is going to happen, nor do we know how comfortable people will be in large gatherings for some time. So the truth is, we’re not going to be able to bounce back like a rubber band. It’s going to take us time to re-engage with our audience.”

’This pandemic has robbed them’

Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading arts lobbying organization, has released the results of a national survey in which 67 percents of the responding arts organizations expected the pandemic to have a “severe” impact on their finances, and 10 percent were not confident they would survive the crisis.

In Lexington, performing arts groups that rely heavily on ticket revenue from large-scale live shows and classes — such as the Lexington Philharmonic, Lexington Children’s Theatre and the Lexington Ballet — have been hit particularly hard.

Being forced to cancel two of its regular-season concerts at the Singletary Center due to the pandemic cost the Lexington Philharmonic at least $400,000 in revenue, Kaiser says.

And the Lexington Ballet lost about $100,000 in revenue because it could not give live performances of “The Nutcracker,” the main source of its annual income, at the Lexington Opera House.

In November, the company did produce an on-demand version of the holiday classic at the Opera House with the dancers masked — it can be streamed from the company’s website, lexingtonballet.org — but the video, which costs $55 to rent or $75 to purchase, generated only a small fraction of the needed revenue, about $20,000 including corporate sponsorships.

“It’s been devastating,” says Dominguez. “We had to let all the dancers go, and they’re devastated. They train 24/7 their whole lives to be able to perform, and a dancer’s career is very short, like that of a gymnast. This pandemic has robbed them of so many things. We’re facing really hard times.”

Against that gloomy backdrop, however, Lexington arts groups have managed to weather the COVID storm better than might have been expected, in part with the help of revenue from donations and other sources.

LexArts’ Fund for the Arts Campaign, for example, managed to raise $763,404 in 2020 despite a $215,000 reduction in the Urban County Government’s contribution from the year before. (Four of the six largest recipients of Fund for the Arts grants in 2020 — the Philharmonic, LCT, the Lexington Art League and the Living Arts and Science Center — received smaller allocations than the year before, while Central Kentucky Youth Orchestras stayed flat and the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning got a slight increase.)

“We got through it,” says Maury Sparrow, LexArts’ communications director. “We have a very loyal donor base that knew the arts were hurting and rose to the occasion.”

Another important lifeline for several Lexington arts groups was the federal CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which gave out pandemic-relief loans, most expected to be forgiven. LCT and the Philharmonic received about $140,000 and $130,000, respectively, in PPP funds. The Lexington Ballet got about $40,000 while Lexington Theatre Company received about $24,000.

“The PPP money was crucial for us because it allowed us to keep our core staff together,” Kisling says. A second round of federal pandemic relief funds were approved late last year, and some local arts groups are in the process of applying.

“The arts will be back, we all know that,” Sparrow says. “If we can just get the vaccine program going, the performing arts will come back looking a lot like it looked before.”

Lexington arts: Moving forward

As daunting as the problems posed by the pandemic remain, arts organizations and some venues have continued to look for innovative, typically small-scale ways to engage audiences.

Visual arts organizations like the Lexington Art League and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, along with private galleries such as New Editions, Institute 193 and the Wills Gallery, are continuing to mount exhibits with COVID-19 protocols in place and limiting the number of visitors and/or requiring appointments.

The Pam Miller Downtown Art Center experimented at one point with allowing dancers, musicians and other solo performers from the community to give small concerts from behind glass doors onstage at the center’s black-box theater for audiences of a dozen or fewer. “We had to discontinue that when the COVID numbers got so high, but we hope to do more of those events when we can,” says the center’s director, Celeste Lewis. “People are just really needing a space to do their thing.”

The Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center is exploring the possibility of “establishing short parlor-type presentations of 45-75 minutes that would allow for cleaning and rotations of guests numbering 25-45,” executive director Whit Whitaker says. “I’m also working on establishing more virtual programming that could be converted to hybrids for simultaneous virtual and live presentations.”

And many groups are continuing to produce original content recorded safely and transmitted to the public in nontraditional ways. AthensWest Theatre Company, for example, is working on “Limestone: 1833,” a new musical play for radio to be broadcast on WUKY-FM on March 22 and 28. Written by local writers Margo Buchanan, Adanma Onyadike Barton and Kevin Lane Dearinger with music by Samuel Lockridge, it is set in Lexington during the 1833 cholera epidemic. It centers on the unlikely friendship of William “King” Solomon, the town drunk, and Aunt Charlotte, a former slave who purchases Solomon, then an indentured servant, at the Cheapside slave market.

“As we face our own pandemic and racial reckoning,” says AthensWest’s producing artistic director Bo List, “this show couldn’t be more timely.”

This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 6:00 AM.