Revisiting Bay Area theater’s first pandemic interviews one year later
Early pandemic interviewing felt like asking someone to peer off a cliff into an abyss and tell me what they saw.
Lily Janiak March 16, 2021Updated: March 16, 2021, 8:11 pm
The Frost Amphitheater begins to fill up for a Kali Uchis and Jorja Smith concert at Stanford. Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 2019
When I interviewed theater artists and producers in late February and early March of last year, I often felt as if I was asking someone to peer off a cliff into an abyss and tell me what they saw.
A year later, I wondered if the scene still looked like an abyss, so I asked five of my early pandemic interviewees to revisit those conversations with me, that we might measure the distance between then, now and what’s to come.
Sal Pizarro: San Jose Dance Theatre recovers some of its stolen costumes [Mercury News]
Jan. 23 After a truly terrible start to the year, there’s been some good news lately for San Jose Dance Theatre. You might remember that nearly 100 of the company’s handmade costumes were stolen when its storage space was broken into this month.
That amounted to thousands of dollars of work and threatened the upcoming May production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” not to mention future productions including San Jose’s longest-running version of “The Nutcracker.”
Artistic Director Linda Hurkmans says that on Jan. 19 a woman named Cynthia Trujillo-Houde saw something sparkly coming out of big black bags left in the street at Bernal Park, at Seventh and Hedding streets. Sixteen tutus were inside, and she posted the strange find on Next Door. Two people who were aware of the theft read her post and told her to contact San Jose Dance Theatre.