Covid-19 has devastated our theatres and museums. But with imagination we can create something better than before.

By Charlotte Higgins: “Music, dance, opera and theatre are in the mass-gathering business, and they will be among the last areas of public life to reopen. Gradually it is being accepted that this is unlikely to occur fully before next spring…

British artists and arts administrators are nothing if not inventive and resilient. They have had to be, to survive post-2010 cuts. They are fizzing with ideas, plans and schemes, some of them more practical than others, some a more direct response to the crisis than others… 

People are modelling every variation: take it outside, downsize it, spread it out, stream it. Could you stage a drive-through opera? Could a composer write a work for a socially distant ensemble? Can you make an online literary festival attractive to audiences when they can’t be in the same room as the authors?

Preventing collapse, though, is only the most basic step. There has been a lot of reflection during the pandemic, not all of it concluding that the arts should pick up exactly where they left off. This may be the moment for structural change.”

Source: The Guardian New & Media