New York City Ballet announced Friday that it would delay the opening of the winter season by nine days, making it the latest prominent performing arts group to cancel or postpone programming due to the recent surge in coronavirus cases.
The company’s winter season, which was scheduled to begin on January 18, now begins on January 27, the company said in a press release. The canceled performances will not be made up; the season will still end as originally scheduled on February 27.
The postponement is yet another virus-related problem for City Ballet, which had to cancel its last 17 performances of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker”, the most popular offering, after several people involved in the production tested positive for the coronavirus. The company said it was forced to postpone the winter season because it lost two weeks of practice time when the virus forced it to close in December.
In a joint statement, Katherine Brown, the ballet’s executive director, and Jonathan Stafford, its artistic director, said the postponement “would give our performers and other staff the necessary time to prepare for a very ambitious winter season.” The season will feature 25 works and all previously announced repertoire, with the exception of Balanchine’s “Diamonds” and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Carnival of the Animals,” which are being rescheduled; and the 12 performances of Peter Martins’ full-length production of “Swan Lake”, which will be replaced by Balanchine’s one-act play “Swan Lake”” in mixed repertory programmes.
“The unexpected seems to keep happening to us and everyone,” Stafford said in an interview. “It’s incredibly disappointing when we have to cancel a performance. It’s not something we take lightly, but the health and safety of our community comes first.”
Over the course of the pandemic, it has been a challenge, Brown added, to constantly have to “make good assessments without a lot of information.”
City Ballet is just one of many performing arts organizations in New York and across the country whose winter programming and pivotal reopening plans have been disrupted by the rapidly spreading omicron variant. On Wednesday, the daily average number of positive cases in the United States was about 585,000, nearly three and a half times the daily average two weeks earlier.
Several Broadway shows have closed early or canceled performances; the Sundance Film Festival announced this week that it would cancel all in-person events for the end of January and go virtual for the second year running. And the Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for January 31 in Los Angeles, have also been postponed.
The new musical “Flying Over Sunset” announced this week that it would end its limited engagement on January 16, a few weeks earlier. The Fire This Time Festival, featuring short plays by aspiring playwrights and scheduled to begin this month, has been moved to July. And in Washington, Ford’s Theater decided to scrap the entire series from the play “The Mountaintop,” citing the wave of business in the area.
In New York, other avant-garde art festivals scheduled for January — including Under the Radar, Prototype, and Exponential Festival — have also canceled their in-person offerings; the Outsider Art Fair said it will hold its 30th anniversary edition a month later than planned, in March; and the Pace Gallery has pushed back the opening dates of some shows that were set to open this month.
The world of classical music has also been affected. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra said Thursday it was postponing its planned Florida tour this month.
And on the dance front, in addition to Friday’s announcement by City Ballet, New York Live Arts announced that the in-person events would go online or be postponed until later in the season. The Joyce Theater’s scheduled performances at Chelsea Factory have been moved from mid-January to early April. The Joyce Theater itself will remain dark until January 26.