Page 69 - BusinessWest September 15, 2021

of success with both in 2021. “June and July were actually our highest-attended months we’ve ever had — and that includes pre-COVID visitor- ship,” said Jenny Wright, the museum’s director of Communications.
“We had that brief moment after Memorial Day when we were able to lift restrictions — but we do have an indoor mask mandate in place since August 4 and require our staff to be vacci- nated. But we’re very fortunate to have the luxury of lots of indoor and outdoor space on our side,”
its famed Sol Lewitt exhibit, to post to the MASS MoCA website.
“Our mission is to make art ... new art that has never existed before,” Wright noted. “When you come here and see that, it’s a powerful experi- ence. But when people are unable to come here, we can still get that story out through our digital programming, whether it’s visual or performing arts.
“For us, it’s really thinking about ways to cre- ate multiple points of entry for people, not just the front door,” she went on. “That was some- thing we hadn’t explored in too much depth before.”
Wissler said the Mount found similar success reaching new audiences virtually. “We were really reluctant to get into the pool of virtual program- ming, but COVID forced us to dive right in — and Zoom programming has been amazing.”
Specifically, events featuring guest authors have been a hit — and found a much broader audience than before. Now, an event that typical- ly drew authors from the mid-Atlantic and New England can bring in guests from pretty much anywhere — and the potential audience has also expanded around the country and even around the world.
“That’s something we’ll continue as we move forward,” Wissler said. “We haven’t found a way to monetize it yet, but from a visitor standpoint, it’s a huge success.”
atively staging an outdoor, socially distanced run of Godspell in August in September — the only show featuring Equity stage actors in the entire country at the time.
Nick Paleologos, executive director, said plan- ning for the 2021 season began in late 2020, and the general feeling as the calendar turned was that current health conditions weren’t going to change dramatically until late 2021 or even 2022.
“So we decided to build on what we learned in the summer of 2020, when we did Godspell out- doors. We planned for a modest but slightly more robust outdoor season on both our campuses, in Stockbridge and Pittsfield.”
In Stockbridge, that meant outdoor runs for The Importance of Being Earnest and a newer play, Nina Simone: Four Women, while in Pitts- field, the theater planned a community version of The Wizard of Oz, but with a slightly scaled-back supporting cast. The organization also scheduled a series of outdoor music performances.
“Then, quite suddenly, Gov. Baker decided to lift all restrictions on Memorial Day weekend, and that caught us a little off guard,” Paleologos said. “We had a planned a whole series of pro- tocols, and now, all of a sudden, we were being told, ‘no problem, go back indoors, you don’t have to wear masks,’ all that.”
So the Stockbridge performances were shifted indoors, to the 120-seat Unicorn Theatre, while The Wizard of Oz in Pittsfield remained outdoors, under tents. While it didn’t have to mandate masks, the Unicorn did require them, even though it had recently upgraded its HVAC system.
Tourism
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“When people are unable to come here, we can still get that story out through our digital programming, whether it’s visual or performing arts.”
she noted, adding that, in addition to the museum’s wide corridors and spa- cious galleries making
it easy to physically dis- tance, MASS MoCA made good use of outdoor courtyard space this year to stage performances. “We’re very fortunate to have space on our side during this period.”
The museum’s robust artist-residency programs continued throughout the pandemic as well.
WomPeAnCoTf online as a way to keep the public connected organizations shut down completely in 2020, even when they weren’t in the building. It’s also Berkshire Theatre Group (BTG) turned in one
“Even before we reinstated our performances,
we were housing artists in residence to develop
new work. That was the catalyst for us developing
new digital programming. That was something
we hadn’t done much of before,” Wright said,
noting that the museum told artist stories with Dramatic Shifts
behind-the-scenes documentaries it then posted While many regional destinations and arts
creating 360-degree virtual tours, starting with
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