A Message From The Performing Arts Community This Holiday Season
It is a staggering, strange, and evolutionary time in our society. As we continue to navigate, adapt, and strive in this revolutionary and challenging time, the collective understanding of our shared experience couldn’t be stronger. We have all been reminded of how fragile the fabric of our day-to-day life is, and how important things are that we may have taken for granted before.
As full-time artists who work year-round to provide entertainment to the great citizens of the Pacific Northwest, we would ask you, as our patrons, fans, friends, and family to consider the everyday impact of art in your lives. These past months would have been much more challenging without film, writing, and music to turn to for comfort, solace, and inspiration.
All this output, all these stories, songs, and experiences are created by people who, just like you, are doing their best to adapt to the world that so rapidly and drastically changed this past March, and are doing everything in their power to get their art into the public arena through mediums that were heretofore unnecessary. They still strive, as we are doing, to create and share experiences and emotions with you.
And while some art easily translates to the “small screen”, artists and patrons alike know that this is just not the same as live performance. Dance, music, theatre, and performing arts organizations were the first to be shut down, and will be the last to reopen. Even large organizations with endowments and donors are struggling to survive. In many cases, the holidays are the time where the majority of their operating budgets are made so they can fund their work into the following year. This holiday season, most organizations will not garner the revenue they depend on to survive.
That’s why we believe that it is more important than ever to support not just Verlaine & McCann productions, but the Performing Arts at-large any way you can this holiday season, whether by streaming online content, giving donations, or promoting your favorite artists through word-of-mouth. Anything you can do to help will sustain the Performing Arts in the Pacific Northwest so we can return to the stage and provide that shared emotional experience of live performance that we all long for.
This is the greatest gift we, as a community of artists, could ask for. We’re all in this together.
To Peace, Love, and Glamour,
Lily & Jasper