How The Clarice is Creating Connection

From a reimagined orchestral institute to a virtual NextNOW Fest, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center takes the arts online during dual pandemics.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

At some point in the future, the curtains will rise again, allowing audiences to engage with live performances of creative theater, dance and music. But for now, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced those in the performing arts and their audiences to create and interact with the art mostly from home. 

Erica Bondarev Rapach took over as acting executive director of The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (The Clarice) on February 2, a little over a month before the university community—and the country—was sent into lockdown. Suddenly, Bondarev Rapach, who was previously the associate executive director of The Clarice, was leading 50 arts professionals and more than 200 student employees through an unprecedented crisis.

The Clarice staff not only had to make quick decisions and announcements about canceling performances and events, but remained committed to paying artists, aiming to reschedule them for virtual interactions or performances during the 2020–21 season whenever possible. All the while, The Clarice stayed connected to its audiences, adapting to present a number of innovative events online. 

We spoke to Bondarev Rapach about how The Clarice has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, plans for the coming season and her hopes for the future. 

For those in the arts community, the loss of human connection during the pandemic has been incredibly hard. Have you also seen the arts buffer some of the emotional and mental impacts of the crisis? 

What we learned pretty quickly—which is actually an affirmation of something we already knew—is that the arts serve to bring people together, even if it’s not in a shared physical space. We can’t replace the energy of being together in person, but we can create an experience that’s hopeful and meaningful and creates connection, even in a virtual space.

Every year, the National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F), presented by the Artist Partner Programs, brings musicians from across the country to The Clarice in June. How did you make the transition to virtual over the summer? 

Instead of canceling the 33rd National Institute + Festival, 51 students got everything from online masterclasses, to virtual panels and seminars with NOI+F faculty. There was even a book club over Zoom, which was optional but students kept showing up! The musicians had the opportunity to create poignant virtual performances, inspired by images of healthcare workers at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, which had been an epicenter of COVID-19 during the New York outbreak. We also wanted to offer something to audiences that had traditionally attended the festival—some of whom have been coming since its inception. We had a virtual “SPARK! Lounge,” where we gathered for pre-broadcast discussions and then followed those discussions with broadcast recordings of NOI+F performances from previous seasons. We streamed those events to Riderwood, a local retirement community.

How has The Clarice continued to engage students and the community during this isolating time? 

We’re still providing professional development opportunities for students interested in arts management. For example, NextNOW Fest, an arts event historically held in September that is curated and marketed by students, added NextNOW Summer Fest during July to test out various streaming platforms in preparation for the fall festival and as a way for students to learn what it’s like to work in a virtual format. 

And we’re continuing to add value to the community, too. We added a virtual arts component to a summer camp for youth from the Latin American Youth Center, a community center near campus, which included a virtual field trip through our building, online classes with Orange Grove Dance, a company run by two alumni from the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and a music class with Lara Downs, one of the professional touring artists we were going to present next season. 

How has The Clarice adjusted to using technology over the past few months? 

Thanks to financial support from the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation, The Clarice, in partnership with the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, had already started investing in livestreaming before the pandemic. Initial research around equipment and technology support had been done and three of our venues were able to host livestreamed events when we went into quarantine, so our production staff had a baseline of skills. We are now set to bring the remaining three public venues online, as well as one of our large lecture-recital venues. We will be investigating ways to make the most use of our livestream capabilities. This could mean an artist or a student could perform in one of the venues without an audience but with a livestream feed.

Our research has also informed the development of mobile livestream kits that we can ship to artists; we supported over 85 livestreamed events for NOI+F; we also collaborated with our colleagues in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies to move “She Kills Monsters” from a physical venue to a livestream platform, which got over 93,000 minutes of viewing time from 15 different countries.

Have you run into challenges with the technology, too?

Of course. We’ve had sessions where the technology is unstable or where the internet has failed. We have also learned that our artists and audiences definitely have different comfort levels with being in a virtual space. That creates limits but our staff has tackled the challenges head on; they have embraced trial and error. We are a research institution at heart, so we’re all about experimentation and failure and learning from that failure. 

In general, I see this time as an opportunity to get better at engaging with our audiences digitally and learning all we can about how people want to experience the arts virtually. Performing arts at its core is about a shared communal experience, but I am less interested in using technology as a replacement for the performing arts and more as an enhancement. We’re going to learn lessons in the process of being confined by the pandemic that will inform how we work in digital spaces going forward. 

I know The Clarice is planning for the future. Any insights into what a 2020–21 season might look like? 

It has been a rollercoaster trying to plan a season in the midst of so much uncertainty. Whatever we do we want it to be in service to artists, the UMD campus and the local community. We are learning that some of our audiences want synchronous experiences, where they’re tuned in to an event with others, there’s a chat and they feel like they’re in a room with people. I’ve also heard other stakeholders reflect on how they would love to have a playlist or a podcast they could listen to while they’re walking their dog or doing the dishes. We recognize that screen fatigue is real and people want to interact with the arts in different ways. We’re looking at things like having outdoor events—we have a big backyard at The Clarice, so what would it take to safely turn that into a venue? Or how could we collaborate with DOTS on performances in parking lots?

We’re also talking about deepening relationships with professional touring artists. Instead of having 20-25 artists as part of the season who only make one visit to campus, we could have 10 artists who make more visits and over a longer period of time, across two seasons instead of one. In this new model, artists would have a home for two years—a place they can really connect to, students they can connect to, communities they can connect to. 

There has also been a focus on the pervasive pandemic of racism in our country. Can you talk about what The Clarice has pledged to do going forward to be anti-racist and to amplify voices that have historically been marginalized? 

The Clarice staff has started engaging in anti-racist training with UMD’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. We are also creating a Community Agreement to guide our work together as a team and to help ensure that we are reflecting diversity, inclusion and trust in our workplace.

As we make choices about the artists we book in the 2020–21 season, we are prioritizing BIPOC artists, and as we build partnerships with artists in future seasons, we will ensure those artists reflect the diversity of our Prince George’s County community. In the shorter term, this month we also launched “Vital Signs: Creative Arts for Black Lives Mini-Grants,” a grant program in collaboration with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Multicultural Involvement & Community Advocacy, Black Terps Matter and our NextNOW Fest student curators. We’re offering $500 to UMD student organizations or student artists who are creating projects that support Black Lives Matter and/or interrogate white supremacy through the lens of their own identity or experience. 

What’s giving you hope about the future of the arts at Maryland? 

There are inspiring conversations happening about how we can make the arts more pervasive at our university. With both pandemics in our midst and calls for change in the arts sector across the country, this is an opportunity to think differently about our service to campus and the role the arts can play in a community. I believe that The Clarice and UMD have the opportunity to be a national model for a university-based performing arts center, and I am looking forward to embarking on that work with my colleagues in the College of Arts and Humanities. We will demonstrate how the arts play a critical role in the transformation we are all experiencing. 

Zoom screenshot by Tiffany Richardson. Erica Bondarev Rapach photo by Nichole Haun.