Deadline: Starting Thursday, attendance at indoor concerts, sporting events, theater performances and conferences is allowed with certain capacity limits based on local Covid-19 infection rates. Those limits were announced on April 2.
As venues reopen today, the State of California also issued detailed guidance for performers and crew at those events where attendees are seated.
8 comments:
I understand that this article was probably just trying to hit the “highlights” of the new guidelines going into place but it still feels like there it is a great deal of things missing from what I would have expected from California. The most interesting part to me of course as it would theoretically affect my department where the guidelines regarding the set department and the singular line talking about how they should look to work when actors and performers aren’t in the space. Now to me this sounds like something that’s just simple common sense don’t try to stack people in the same space at the same time while limiting the capacity of the spaces, simple math. What’s really interesting is when you read the actual guidelines and you find there really isn’t much more than that and that almost all of these things are suggestions not requirements or baselines but suggestions for how to mitigate. Ultimately a lot of these things I think will change and be unique for certain departments and companies producing work.
I agree with Mattox's comment, it seems like these guidelines are very vague and lacking. They focus much more on the performers and barely on crew however even the performer guidelines are vague. Even reading the more in-depth release from the state of California it still seems quite vague. I wonder how much of a role people who were actually in the industry were involved in drafting this document. I know that for some venues following these guidelines will be a challenge based on space limitations. I also think that there is going to be a huge discrepancy between venues and companies because these are presented as guidelines not mandated. I am curious to see how theater companies approach these guidelines in their reopening and if they are doable and reasonable. I am curious also about the changes that will have to be made and how they will impact theater as a whole in the long run.
Not sure if California fully understands that the day they open vaccination to all groups above 16 years of age probably should not also be the day they open a bunch of indoor venues for gathering, since, you know, not everyone is going to be vaccinated on day one. The guidelines offered are simultaneously so specific and yet so vague. They are really specific for certain areas and people, but do not do anything to bridge those departments or help a venue operate on any scale larger than maybe a handful of groups independent of each other. Then again, everyone's a critic, myself included, and they'll prove us wrong by having everything work out just fine. I also am with Kaisa in wondering how involved the people who work these venues and these industries were involved in setting up these guidelines, or if it was all just state legislature.
The guidelines released to performers don’t really seem like anything too crazy. If anything, I feel like this is what people should have been doing for this entire pandemic, even for outdoor performances. Why start so late in the game? On top of that, this a very vague list of guidelines. Like Mattox, I think it’s important that specific guidelines are set for different kinds of events. I think that a musical would need stricter guidelines than a play. There are also specific guidelines that I believe would need to be in place for concerts including countless other examples. I wonder how well people will actually follow the rules that come with allowing people into indoor venues. I completely understand the rush to get back to organizing and/or attending indoor events, but it’s important to remember that even though people can get tested every week or get vaccinated, we are still living in a pandemic. There is still a dangerous virus going around. It does feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but I feel like a lot of industries and companies are really in a hurry to reach that light.
I also find it strange how vague these guidelines are, and it seems to me that these are things people have been doing for the past few months… Putting this document together is somewhat useless in that sense since these are just guidelines. It definitely does feel like the group that put this together doesn’t work in the performing arts. I wonder if using microphones would do more harm than good since that microphone has to then be handled by all of the crew. They can also be muffled really easily by protective wear like masks and visors. Based on clips I’ve seen of productions using visors and microphones, the sound quality was pretty bad and would’ve sounded much better without them, even for the musicals. Overall, I think California is one of the places where they’ll just have to wait until more people are vaccinated. They didn’t handle the pandemic well and it’s going to take longer for everything to be safe again over there.
Like others have said, I agree that this is a really strange list of guidelines. I agree with all of them and I think that they are very important, but I am hoping there is a more detailed document somewhere that has better specifics and more put together guidelines for live events. This all sounds very feasible but specific guidelines for specific types of events I think are also needed rather than just a catch-all set of guidelines for events in general. I am hoping that with more and more people getting vaccinated for COVID, that we can start expanding live events at this point. We have come a really long way since the beginning of this pandemic and I think that if there was a vaccine card requirement for every indoor live event, that entertainment can start happening again. I am interested in what the summer will bring for live events and the entertainment industry.
This past year, whenever California gets to a point where they reopen something to some capacity, Covid cases skyrocket and they have to revert back to stricter restrictions. From this experience, I do not have much trust regardless of the "recommendations" they put in place such as waiting in your car instead of a line at auditions. Regardless of vaccine distributions, I would not be surprised if this reverts. However, I did read an article on the LA Times the other day saying that 52% of adults in California are now partially vaccinated. In this case, there may be a better chance that this new guideline was not called prematurely. A lot of the times I think that California's moves on guidelines are just premature, and is definitely pushing limits on what is safe. Having been living in California for the first 9 months of the pandemic, then coming to Pittsburgh, I will say that people do not wear masks at all outside where I would say 60% of pedestrians here do, and Californians literally have no regard for how socially distant strangers are comfortable with and literally act like there is no pandemic because they are outside. Sucks.
California is really interesting with when they do and don't care about covid. This list of restrictions doesn't seem to make sense. It also doesn't really make sense to me that they are opening indoor venues in California of all places, since the weather is pretty nice all of the time, and pretty predictable. I spent the last few weeks in California, and I was honestly disgusted at the amount of people that weren't wearing masks when walking around the beach (near a TON of people), and the amount of people in my town that were clearly tourists. I guess that is a price to pay for living in a tourist attraction, but I still think it is too soon in the pandemic for people to be making trips, especially if they weren't gonna wear masks when on the trip. I feel like California has been one of the least compliant states as far as covid restrictions, so this may not be a good move.
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