We spoke on December 15th as 2020 was nearing its end; the Covid crisis was escalating instead of diminishing; a new president had been elected and three weeks before the turmoil that shocked the world on January 6th.

Last week we got an update on CAP UCLA’s remaining events in their 2020-2021 season when it was announced on January 15th that all previously scheduled live events for this season had been cancelled. Not a surprise after what Edmunds told me.

What follows are excerpts from that conversation which have been edited for length and clarity.

When we spoke in March you said that it was important on an emotional and structural level to have a future time you can work towards. How have you managed the constantly shifting realities of the pandemic and how that impacts your ability to put a schedule together?

You know what I did at the beginning, I think you fall forward towards your biggest values. It clarifies things, at least for me. I had to pull my mind towards what is it we can do. What is my top priority? I decided early on to start initiating commissions, as in micro-commissions, commission with a small “c,” to as many different artists as we could to manifest different kinds of work.

What are you seeing as the cultural response, particularly in the creation of new material, to this past year?

There’s a lot of pretty deep soul searching. What is the work that feels the most necessary? Not necessarily my next idea, but what do I have to offer into this dialogue now where this economy is profoundly altered. I think many of them – and it depends on the art form – what are the stories that need to be told that help the public find a way back together. They are composing and making and thinking. You watch artists really authentically try to invent how they can contribute their artistry in a different way, which is revealing their humanity in a different way. There’s been a lot of really remarkable results.

Our biggest concern is how we put our bodies back together and try to hold a stage in a meaningful way. An audience is going to be ready to see us at top speed. It will take us a while to get there.

Over the past four years we’ve had an administration in place that essentially actively tried to defund the arts. With the Biden administration how do you expect the dialogue between government and the performing arts to change?

I think we’ll have some ears on that this time around. One of the biggest pieces that will fall forward in this is how do we now work on creating a national cultural policy. How do we look at the roll government does – and can – play in how artists are at the table for social and cultural belonging? We play a pretty substantial role in the grief of a nation coming back together in a much more compassionate way. That cultural policy and how we are valued for what we generate into a national and global community matters.

Our activity accrues benefits to society adjacent to us. Meaning, we seek money to sustain our practices. What we spend it on, and what our activities generate, benefits businesses peripherally and interdependent on us. The more we are put back into activation with a baseline support for that activation, it helps a recovery where adjacent interlocking things benefit along with us.

Can and will the arts fully recover from the pandemic? If so, what will it take?

In the health department updates I get, it will likely be unevenly distributed based on what part of the country we live in. It’s pretty clear that most of us, larger venues or anything with 200 or more people, are being strongly encouraged to look at early 2022 as to when we’ll probably have some more mobility of gathering to some scale. That’s a long time. Ticket revenues make up 50-75% of most organizations’ annual budget. That is eviscerated and will continue to be. The economic fallout will be much larger and longer. It’s probably an additional three years before you see something rebound.

When you look back on 2020, what were the best things to come out of the pandemic?

One of the best things was the way in which colleagues and organizations across the spectrum – from small tiny community cultural spaces up to the grand halls – we started sharing ideas, problem-solving, working on contract language, connections. You’re always reasonably pivoted within your profession and your eco-system to collaborate in service to one another in the big picture. How can we keep a cultural framework functioning? How can we keep each other persisting? How can we help each other overcome denial? How can we share strategies? A lot of those things were a really remarkable piece of it.

You told KCET during the Tune-In Festival that one thing that was important about the festival was to “ignite the public to stay strong and feel inspired.” How have you ignited yourself to do the same thing?

For me it’s about continuing to be in lockstep with what artists are doing. I can have a conversation with an artist, who is as profoundly distraught as I might be, but in that conversation we are able to reignite one another, to keep trying, to find a form, to change what that might be and keep trying.

I was talking to a dancer and she said live performance isn’t happening right now, but the dance is still alive. Artists are going “How do we keep collaborating and work with each other?” Artists are finding these places where somehow the glue in the cracks is a kind of kindness and compassion and a willingness to manifest some form of connection. That is ultimately what is going to be what the tail end of this is. We’ve been able to stand in solidarity with people and say we are here as part of what this is. We are able stand in front of a country that doesn’t understand our practice, but did find out that they actually missed us.

CAP UCLA’s upcoming streaming programs includes an already-running concert with saxophone legend Charles Lloyd (available through January 31st); Douglas J. Cuomo’s Seven Limbs featuring Nels Cline and the Aizuri Quartet (available February 12th) and Israel Galván Maestro de Barra on March 6th.

Photo of Kristy Edmunds by Lovis Ostenrick/Courtesy CAP UCLA

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When I spoke to Edmunds on Wednesday, March 18th by phone, it would be another full day before the Metropolitan Opera in New York cancelled the rest of their season. Other venues have since started to make similar announcements.

These are edited excerpts (for length and clarity) from my conversation with Edmunds.

Before getting into the practical part of the world in which we find ourselves, after working so hard to put together your 2019-2020 season, how did you and your team navigate the emotional part of seeing it come apart?

It was certainly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I think, if I understand the community and our fans and audience enough, as hard as this it, it is a line that at least creates some clarity that allows us to redirect our energy into the things we need to do. Which is cope, keep ourselves healthy and safe and protect the community. Then look out to the future differently. It was really really hard.

This is a team of people who are doers, as all of us are in the arts. Part of it is scrambling to go, “there must be something else we can do; there must be something can do for our fans, our artists,” so you start sequencing that. We realized we were heading to the whole of the season. I had a chance to prepare my team so that announcement was something we can do with less chaos.

You were the first performing arts organization in Los Angeles to announce the suspension of the entire remaining part of your season. What, if any, conversations did you have with other institutions about their long-term plans and is there a consensus amongst other venues that this is the inevitable path going forward?

I’ve been in conversations with colleague organizations small, medium and large; locally, statewide, West Coast, nationally and internationally. Because I am at UCLA, an institution that has academics, research, a hospital and more, we were part of preparedness planning. I felt it was imperative to speak with colleagues who wouldn’t have that information about what the government – state or city – would be doing. Everyone will speak to what their own duty of care and community is needed and to their operating models. But we try to be in touch regularly.

Beyond suspending the season, what does this do to your artists, many of whom are on tours?

When a performance project cancels or when it is suspended, and I’m now speaking broadly, it tends to be in the contract that the performers are paid when they complete the performance. Wanting to get on the front foot to address that, let’s begin rescheduling. If everyone is up for that, that’s what we’ll be doing. We’re already involved with protecting and structuring dates. However uncertain future dynamics will be, it allows a future time we can work towards. On an emotional and structural level that is important.

There are some other things that are probably not unique to us, but there is a sequence of determinations that had to do with international performers about to land in the United States or were already here and they were working their way to Los Angeles. We had Ladysmith Black Mambazo returning back from their memorial services in South African for the death of their founder (Joseph Shabalala). They are in grief, but feel it is an absolute duty to carry on their music as he wanted. When they returned to the United States, they landed in Cincinnati who announced urgently they were cancelled. They didn’t even know the venue they were headed to had cancelled. I said to the tour manager, “You’re coming here, whatever you need.” On Monday we had them on the Royce Hall stage performing and we filmed it and will get it to people. It was a way to let them do spiritually and structurally what their mentor and founder had asked them to do. They are now in transit back and they have not yet landed as I speak to you now.

How do you see the role of the arts once this crisis has passed?

How do I say it? Artists and theatre makers and musicians and performing arts and visual media and everything, essentially we’ve always been working on some way to give form to an essentialness that we offer. We do that out of a professional call to our practices. I keep thinking about we’re all going to experience these new contours when we get back together as a community as very differently ravaged and all impacted human beings. And in that time period, I feel like then it is going to be our turn to support that essentialness that the arts have provided far differently than we ever have before.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” In our world today, what would you suggest those of us who love the arts do while we all wait this out?

I don’t want to sound too esoteric, but honestly, the arts have always helped us practice who we are in relation to it. It helps us practice who are with that which is other or like in the moment that we are there. We can still practice that before we needed to understand ourselves in this moment. I feel like reflecting on that artistry that mattered a lot to us and talking about it and using it for its inspiration and resilience and prescientness is useful to us. We practiced how we encountered that feeling in a fictional environment and now in a very real set of environments. And that’s useful. It’s useful to communicate hither and yon the importantance the arts play in our national fabric.

The other thing is we are going to need all matter of shekels to come forward, wherever possible, to get on the other side. You want to make sure people are in place when we come roaring back with a community that is going to be differently attenuated and hopefully craving our offer.

Photo of Kristy Edmunds by Reed Hutchinson (Courtesy of CapUCLA)

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