Artists coping with COVID-19

In some quarters, Kaua‘i may not be seen as a center of the serious arts — classical music, drama and visual media — but the island has a greater amount of those disciplines than many people think, and the often-unseen arts community is, increasingly, living in fear of COVID-19 and its inevitable aftermath.

Kaua‘i has a wide range of nonprofit arts organizations, from the Kaua‘i Concert Association, which stages performances of everything from string quartets to tango ensembles, Women In Theatre and the Kaua‘i Society of Artists. There are at least a dozen Kaua‘i nonprofit arts organizations.

Kaua‘i Community College’s Performing Arts Center is typically booked months in advance. Under just a limited order that the center shut down completely until at least May 13, producers said that a minimum of 69 rehearsal and performance days have been wiped out if the impact of the shutdown on scheduled future programs is taken into account.

The Kaua‘i Concert Association, which mounts largely classical music events at KCC and disparate other venues, like the popular St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Lihu‘e, has already canceled its next show at KCC. It was to have been a performance by La Voix, an international drag performance icon whose appearance at KCC last year was nearly sold out.

KCA’s last show at the center was in early March, a wildly successful performance by the JP Jofre Hard Tango Chamber Band that was part of the Hawai‘i International Music Festival. The ensemble, led by noted Argentinian tango practitioner J.P. Jofre, featured a performance by Monica Chung, a Kaua‘i-based, classically-trained pianist. To many, Chung is the voice of the arts on Kaua‘i.

“It’s a very sad time right now for arts and culture,” said Joe Daisy, KCC’s chancellor. “Some of the health professionals say this could be with us until the fall. Reopening (the performing arts center) in May is a soft date that we put out there.”

Jason Blake, KCA’s board president, said the organization had three concerts “penciled out” for the rest of 2020 before the COVID-19 emergency hit. “We kind of feel we can’t move forward with any of that, at least,” Blake said. “The only good thing is we’re a 100% volunteer organization. If we don’t get to do our shows, it’s not like that would break us.” KCA operates on a budget of $150,000 to $200,000 a year, he said.

Blake and other nonprofit arts organization leaders interviewed by The Garden Island said the dire ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic require creative groups to be judicious in how much they go public with their financial plights — many of the organizations may cease to exist if the statewide lock-down and other precautions against the epidemic continue for more than the next few weeks.

He and other arts leaders said the arts community must keep a careful sense of perspective and understand that fundraising and other recovery strategies must, for the moment, take a back seat to far-more-urgent priorities of public health. “At this point, we don’t know what we would be fundraising toward,” he said.

“We don’t have a confirmed show for the next two years at this point,” he said. Trying to raise money in the current climate of tragedy and fear “would feel a little slick. We’re not going to actively fundraise.”

Chung, who counts an ongoing commitment to be accompanist to Kaua‘i Voices, a volunteer choral group that draws on talent island-wide, among her disparate activities, said it remains to be seen if the obstacles to ongoing success of home-grown Kaua‘i arts organizations will be “insurmountable.”

But, she said, “I definitely have concerns in general. I don’t want to speculate or mistakenly set the tone for what may happen, but my fear is this goes on for some length of time, because these arts organizations rely so much on the actual time of performance and the audience being there and willing to shell out for tickets.

“When things start to come around and people can pick up their lives, we’ll have to see: Will they be willing to pay for a ticket? I have concerns that people are going to be looking at ways to save money. This isn’t Vegas, but, at the same time, the arts would be the last place many people would consider supporting and the first to be put on the list of unnecessary expenses.”

Chung has shifted piano lessons she gives online. She has also started streaming on Facebook her daily home-practice sessions, in which she plays (so far) various “Symphonic Etudes” by Robert Schumann. Chung’s dog, Ava, positions herself on a nearby chair, observing and occasionally critiquing the performances.

One of the first victims of Kaua‘i’s arts shutdown has been production — to be staged at KCC — of a new play, “Siddhartha,” based on the Herman Hesse novel about self-discovery in the time of Gautama Bhuddha, an Indian philosopher who lived about 2,500 years ago.

The play was written by Greg Shepherd, a KCC music professor. He said casting was completed in January and the production had been in rehearsal. He said he now assumes the show simply will not go on in 2020 and that, by the time it can open, many students in the cast and production team now will have moved on to four-year colleges and the process will have to be completely redone. “It just completely messes us up,” he said.

Bailey Hutton, president of Kaua‘i Community Players, said his organization’s situation is complicated by the fact that it shares a facility, the Puhi Theatrical Warehouse, with Hawaii Children’s Theatre. The two groups lease the Puhi space for six months each.

Kaua‘i Community Players called an emergency board meeting last week, Hutton said, after members “got enough information that this (COVID-19 emergency) wasn’t going to calm down or simmer down.” The board voted to cancel this year’s season.

But the decision leaves the organization in limbo since lease commitments require it to pay rent for half of each year. He said the group asked ticket-buyers to not seek refunds. “It seemed a little insensitive to push for donations,” he said. If the rent responsibility question can be resolved, he said, “we have somewhat of a threshold to endure this and come out on the other side and still exist.”

Elizabeth Hahn, president of Kaua‘i Voices, said the group, for the moment, is continuing rehearsals for a previously scheduled set of concerts in June celebrating music made famous by Motown Records. The performances have been canceled, but the singers have been continuing to rehearse via streaming video.

“We all have recorded practice tracks,” Hahn said, “and we can rehearse them individually. It’s amazing what you can do when you really have the desire to do it.”

Hahn said Kaua‘i Voices has also decided to delay any kind of fundraising operation until more critical problems facing Kaua‘i are resolved. “We are not asking people for money right now because the situation is so nebulous,” she said. “Music is what we do to share love.”

The financial ramifications of having little or no revenue coming in may force Kaua‘i Voices to step back from an ambitious decision to hold many of its concerts at KCC. The facility cost may no longer be something the group can afford, plus KCC’s PAC is closed for the duration. “I think the world has changed,” Hahn said, “but there is always going to be a need for music.”

Nellie Foster, president of Women In Theatre, said the COVID-19 shutdown may force her organization out of its current space in Kukui Grove Center. WIT already vacated one Kukui Grove space when the landlord said he needed it for another tenant. Now, the theater is in space usually taken over by Macy’s during each Christmas shopping season, though Macy’s has also shut down due to COVID-19.

She said WIT may have to plead with Kukui Grove Center to waive its rent for the duration of the crisis.

“That’s pretty much it for us right now,” she said. “We’re barely getting by.” She said rehearsals and set-building for WIT’s next production had not begun when the closure order came. “We don’t want to cancel the whole season unless we have to,” she said.

For Kaycee Parker, a Kaua‘i-based violinist who often plays with the Honolulu Symphony, the COVID-19 closures have brought a sudden end to her side business, Strings of Kaua‘i, which arranges solo, duet, trio or ensemble classical musicians to play at weddings and other special events. She also plays with several community-based music ensembles. She said brides with June and July wedding dates have been canceling in large numbers. “I actually don’t expect to recover any of the losses I’m experiencing,” she said.

But she says she has faith that changes in the willingness of Kaua‘i audiences to support classical music in the last 10 years have not been permanently reversed. “I think we are not going to see a loss of appreciation and support for the arts,” she said.

“If anything, people will realize how important the arts are. More than ever, people will be just hungry for that type of enrichment and joy.”

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Allan Parachini is a Kilauea resident, furniture-maker, journalist and retired public relations executive who writes periodically for The Garden Island.