To Perform or Not to Perform: Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 on Aotearoa New Zealand's Performing Arts Sector

Abstract

This article explores narratives of how COVID-19 impacted the performing arts sector, by drawing on interviews with creative workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite the late exposure to COVID-19 and the adoption of an elimination approach that afforded opportunities for performing arts to continue to varying extents between 2019 and 2022, cultural workers in Aotearoa New Zealand, as with their overseas counterparts, experienced significant and consequential disruption to their working conditions and lives. Taking into account the specificity of Aotearoa New Zealand's performing arts sector and the government's COVID-19 response, the article contributes to the empirical examination of COVID-19 experiences by teasing out narratives of impact from cultural workers. The thematic analysis demonstrates how participants presented (1) COVID-19 as responsible for financial, emotional, and psychological costs, (2) framed opportunities arising from disrupted working conditions and wage subsidy as “silver linings,” (3) were reliant on digital technologies, and (4) constructed the return to “normal” as marked by the COVID-19 “aftermath.” The article argues that uniting these perceptions and articulations of impact is the ongoing (re)evaluations of risks and benefits by cultural workers of working conditions that predate COVID-19.