She says crewing the show hasn't been easy. Rees is now working as stage manager and juggling full-time work with part-time study. Harry Potter is back on stage and set to transition to its reimagined one-part format in May.
"I would love to stay in the industry I just don't know how feasible it will be moving forward," Rees says. Since the start of the year, several major events including Tamworth Country Music Festival and the Broken Heel drag festival have been cancelled or delayed because of the Omicron outbreak, leaving many in the industry once again without work.Īs Australia continues to adjust to a new COVID normal, it's time to take stock of two years of uncertainty, and the challenging road ahead for the Australian performing arts. While live performance has returned, the sector's recovery now depends on an ever-evolving set of COVID-safe protocols, public health orders and new variants.
In summary: from the start of the pandemic to November 2021, performing arts and live events workers reported income losses totalling $417.2 million, and over 374,000 cancelled gigs. Less than 1 per cent said they had income protection or insurance. Nine in 10 respondents said they had been unable to work or significantly hindered by COVID-19 restrictions since March 2020. Of the 2,363 responses identified by the ABC as relating to the performing arts and live events, a further $91.5 million in lost income was reported from cancelled work. ILMG conducted a follow-up to their 2020 survey to capture the second wave of cancellations. Theatre productions were once again shuttered Cyrano among them.īut she knows of at least eight other Australian companies that have gone through the same thing. With the injection of support from JobKeeper between April and September 2020 and the eventual lifting of lockdown restrictions nationally by early 2021, full-time and part-time employment in the sector rebounded to pre-pandemic levels by February 2021.īut in June, just as theatres had begun reopening, the Delta variant plunged swathes of the country back into lockdown and arts and entertainment employment fell again by 8 per cent. These cancellations put thousands of Australians out of work.ĪBS employment data shows that job losses among full-time and part-time employed arts and entertainment workers peaked in the first three months of the pandemic, with a 40 per cent decline between February and May 2020. Those jobs ranged from large-scale theatre productions to regular pub gigs and amounted to lost income of more than $325.6 million. While Melbourne and Sydney have been hardest hit, the story of the performing arts across Australia since March 2020 has been one of delays, pauses and cancellations.ĪBC analysis of survey data from I Lost My Gig (ILMG), a joint initiative between the Australian Music Industry Network and the Australian Festival Association, identified 12,846 workers in the performing arts and live entertainment who reported over 298,000 cancelled job opportunities in the first six months of the pandemic.
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