by I got a new job. I am the COVID Safety Supervisor at a large opera company. It’s a new position that was just created and it is a new figure in the performing arts that is being recommended for any company that wants to open before the declared end of the pandemic.
Note: The facts and resources in this article are up to date as of this writing, however I do not intend to update as events progress. This piece serves to document my thoughts and ideas at this moment and stand as a reminder to the world that we lived in when we look back on it.
It has almost been one year since the first case of SARS-CoV-2 was documented in the United States. In that time 23,000,000 Americans have become infected with this disease and nearly 400,000 of those have died. Life has changed for everyone, more drastically for some than others. The live events industry is unrecognizable in the few places that it still exists. Innumerable companies have gone dark and so many of them will never return.
Last year on this weekend, I was an adjudicator for the Southwest USITT Student Design Technology and Management Competition. I met with three other theater professionals who had just flown in from across the country to form our team of judges. I then spent the next day and a half meeting students, listening to timed presentations of their work and offering my thoughts and reflections. We moved around the exhibit hall in a tight group, the non presenting students pressed shoulder to shoulder to see the models, drafts, and renderings and to hear what the adjudicators had to say. I met more than a hundred students that weekend. It is safe to say I shook more hands in two days than I would in the remaining calendar year combined. It was a fun and eventful weekend, and I had no idea that it was one of the last professional gatherings I would have.
My purpose as the COVID Safety Supervisor for an opera company that is trying to reopen pre-vaccine is stay up to date on the latest developments, create and monitor policy, interface with all departments about the execution of that policy, and walk around and tell everyone to pull their mask over their nose. I have a group of skilled collaborators, but I am the only person in the company whose sole focus is safety in regard to this virus. Everyone else has to plan and execute the shows while they relearn how to do just that.
This position is interesting. Though I report to the Production Manager as my supervisor, I am also an independent operator that can and will interact with every member of the company. I am a member of the production department, and I need to be keenly aware of how each step of the production process operates, but I have no responsibilities to execute the production elements. I was hired on my qualifications to fill this position, but it’s a job I didn’t go to school for, because no one has. It is a paradox in many ways.
The qualifications for this job are wide and varied. Are you familiar enough with the intricacies of the performing arts in a way that you could extract some parts like jenga blocks without disturbing others? Can you quickly absorb new information, sorting fact from fiction, and today’s facts from the facts of six months ago? Can you follow all of your own rules, even when you think no one is watching? Will you tell your boss’s boss to put on a mask? Can you imagine the worst case scenario for every situation without falling into a deep existential crisis? It’s not for everyone, but an organized stage manager mindset is a great place to start.
I start everyday with numbers. I check the infection and fatality trends for the nation, state and county. I look to see how the vaccination is progressing. I check the number of open ICU beds in the county. I look for new announcements or tweets from the CDC, the governor, the county judge, or any of the Health and Human Services offices. After that I check my email. Then I work on a course. There are so many excellent training opportunities out there for COVID and I don’t know what I don’t know. So I work through a class a little every day and when I finish one, I start another. I rarely go more than a day without talking to the facility manager, the rehearsal and planning admin, and the technical director. I meet with the production manager and the big boss at least twice a week. Throw in some other meetings with HR, the venue production manager, IT, the education director, and the orchestra manager and that will round out the week.
My biggest project this week was making a list of all the people in the company. It sounds like an easy task. But when you consider casts, understudies, union stage crew, house stage crew, orchestra, security, education, front of house, and all the office workers that may or may not still be working virtual, it turns into a huge spreadsheet that has 250 names on it. I divided those names into different bubbles, and then tried to determine if one show could be salvaged if someone in another show tested positive. This slightly macabre exercise identifies the individuals that have multiple roles within the company who might need to scale back. Next week, I will try to determine how much time it takes to cycle the air in and out of the orchestra pit.
It may sound strange, but I quite like this gig. I work with great artists and technicians who are good at what they do. They know the deck isn’t stacked in our favor and they are willing to explore incredibly creative ideas to make the shows work. I also like the logic of it. For all the chaos COVID has caused, it follows a set of rules, it behaves in a predictable manner, and if you approach it with logic you can beat it with logic. I also appreciate the audacity of the leadership. This situation is not easy, and there are people depending on the company for their livelihood. The safest answer would be to board up the windows and wait, but those windows may never open. Better to put those folks to work, spend money on people and new ideas and solutions and try to be as safe as possible and try your very best. We must also know that we can do everything right and we still might fail.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.” – Jean-Luc Picard
Ultimately, this job is about hope. The daily readings of the grim statistics can drag you down and make you feel like you are fighting an impossible force. But the existence of the COVID safety supervisor is the bold belief that live events are worth fighting for. That we can take everything that we know apart and rebuild it one piece at a time and that effort is better than an empty stage. People feel an innate need to gather and have communal experiences, and one day, little by little we will gather again.
