Welcome to our latest Newsletter – the first one ever written in the middle of a global pandemic.
As the current Chair of the Board of Trustees of Opera Anywhere, I have seen a number of challenges over recent years that the Board have had to face. Though it may sound somewhat trite to say so, nothing could have prepared us for the havoc being wreaked upon us by Covid-19.
To be told that all performances are severely curtailed until further notice was a massive body blow to Opera Anywhere. At the very least, our extensive performance schedule would have had to be reduced dramatically, directly impacting on our highly acclaimed contribution to culture and the performing arts.
Fortuitously, communications technology provides us all with vital support in our daily lives as we know, and I’m sure I echo the thoughts of many of you when I say – thank goodness for Zoom and the many other online tools that have now become key communication and productivity tools for all of us. Opera Anywhere Trustee meetings via Zoom have now become our new ‘normal’ and it has been wonderful to see how the uptake of this has enabled our meetings not only to take place but to be the spur to developing our own unique ‘online’ presence.
Thanks to some amazing hard work by key members of our team, we have been fortunate to have received a grant from the Arts Council to take some existing productions and really develop a range of marketing and workshop materials so that the work of Opera Anywhere can continue – and indeed grow – despite the difficult times that we are living through.
I always marvel at the sheer ingenuity of people as they face adversity and in particular since the start of this pandemic. It has been an enormous privilege to watch the sheer determination and imagination being deployed as we face up to the Covid-19 challenge together. I am enormously proud to be a member of the Board and I am certain that we will eventually come out of these terrible times together, even stronger, and more resolute than ever to keep on quenching the thirst for culture by performing Opera Anywhere.
