How is New York City’s arts scene faring in the wake of the pandemic?
That’s the question WNYC’s Sean Carlson posed to a panel of industry experts from off-Broadway, music and dance, to see how their venues are faring in the new normal.
In a live broadcast of “All Things Considered,” Carlson spoke to Casey York, president of the Off-Broadway League; Anna Glass, executive director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem; and Jake Rosenthal, co-founder of Elsewhere, an event venue in Bushwick.
Their conversation covered everything from how fewer office workers affect the city’s culture, to why big stars like Taylor Swift aren’t necessarily the future of show business.
A lightly edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Sean Carlson: Casey, you were appointed as a member of the mayor’s 52-person council [to develop strategies to promote the city’s live performance industry]. What are its goals?
Casey York: Absolutely. And thanks so much for having me here. It’s a pleasure to be on the stage with these esteemed panelists. So, we met two weeks ago at Gracie Mansion. And it was a really vibrant room talking about big ideas. We were all asked to bring in challenges and opportunities and sort of work through a way into some subcommittees, which of course, that’s something you have to do.
The thing that got me the most excited was looking at ways that we might alchemize some really big ideas around real estate, right? There’s a lot of vacant office spaces in New York City, in Midtown. Could those be converted into performance spaces? Into affordable housing for artists and arts workers?
That’s what makes New York what it is – the cultural lifeblood, and figuring out ways that we might work across industries to have partnerships from the nonprofit side, the commercial sector, and think in the brave ideas that artists are so good at doing.
Jake, we’ve heard a lot this summer about Beyoncé, right? We have Taylor Swift and her Eras Tour. Everyone’s going to these…
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