The 2020 fall arts season looks a lot different than it has in years past, for the obvious reason. But even if gallery attendance is restricted and many performance venues remain shuttered, there are a ton of great writers, performers, visual artists, and multigenre talents to catch up with, no matter what stage of personal shutdown you’re in right now. We asked some curators, along with Reader staff, to tell us what they’re excited about right now. Obviously this is a very small slice of what’s out there, and we’ll be trying to cover as much of it as possible in the months to come, just as we have for the past 50 years.
When the shutdown first hit, many companies moved to put archival content online. But over the past several months, we’ve seen more pieces created exclusively for the screen, along with strong suggestions that this way of working won’t go away for local theaters, even once it’s safe to gather in live venues again. Here are a few that seem particularly intriguing to me:
Black Joy
The Dance Center of Columbia College offers help for the hungry with a full-to-bursting menu of virtual workshops and performances. They not only range over many genres of dance but address aspects of production and self-preservation in pandemic times and beyond, including lighting design, financial wellbeing, contracts, pedagogy, and more. A $20 donation gets you everything on the “dessert” menu—performances by dancers Po’Chop, Nejla Yatkin, and Jumaane Taylor. Eat it all through 10/26 at dance.colum.edu.
(Irene Hsiao is a frequent Reader contributor.)
Loy Webb: She has a powerful brilliant voice that I gravitated towards immediately, with a bold perspective. She had a meteoric rise first with her Jeff Award-winning play The Light that went from Chicago to off Broadway and then followed it up with her Jeff-nominated play His Shadow at 16th Street Theater, directed by Wardell Julius Clark. Now her first short film, Boyega Brides, is blowing up the Internet. I think she might be unstoppable and I’m looking forward to seeing what is next for her trajectory.
