When it comes to cultural gatherings, 2021 started slow because it had no other choice. During the first half of the year the events section of this paper was filled with recommendations for homemade, indoor and often solo entertainment options—through winter and spring we were reading books, listening to music and consuming visual arts from the comfort and safety of our homes.
The first big event on the calendar came in February, with CSU Monterey Bay’s celebration of Black History Month. While all events took place on Zoom, the program was vast and included a meeting with writer Bettina Love, who wrote We Want to Do More Than Just Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, and a sustainable soul food cooking workshop with award-winning chef Bryant Terry.
Before the year picked up steam in earnest, we often went for half-solutions or pandemic-era variations—desperate to get out of the house (even if only in our cars). This is where the spacious venues of Monterey County Fairgrounds came in handy—playing host to drive-in movies (a throwback!) and concerts. Some venues, like the Salinas Sports Complex, were in use for vaccination clinics first, and after shelter-in-place orders were lifted, went back to opening their doors for events, like the California Rodeo Salinas.
It was summer that brought us back to the streets—or at least tried to, as double-vaccinated social animals started to check out returning cultural events.
After the state of California opened up on June 15, most local theaters tried to re-open in some form or another. Pacific Repertory Theatre put on a two-show summer run, performing Julius Caesar and Shrek the Musical at Carmel’s Outdoor Forest Theater. In an interview about the return of the performing arts with the Weekly, PacRep Executive Director Stephen Moorer said the performers were very aware how precarious it all is: “Every weekend we’re like ‘OK, we got through another weekend,” he said.
July ended with the first edition of the Carmel Dance Festival (July 23-24)—an in-person, outdoor performing arts experience that, for many of us, was a welcome return. This year also saw the launch of Ballare Carmel, a locally-based and globally-sourced professional dance ensemble. In late September, a first iteration of dancers from around the world workshopped with London-born and Switzerland-based choreographer Ishan Rustem and under leadership of Lilian Barbeito, who created the project.
Events continued to pick up from there—Aug. 1 brought TED back to its roots in Monterey. Conference tickets ($1,200, invite-only) may have been out of the price range of most, but it brought singer Lizzo (and many other interesting scientists, entrepreneurs and more) into town. Then, on Aug. 5, the art park in Sand City officially opened, introducing a new outdoor community space ready for the return of the 20th West End Celebration and second annual we.Art mural festival.
In terms of music, the year belonged to Patti Smith, who visited Henry Miller Library in Big Sur in September and, by all accounts, rocked the crowd. That was followed by the long-awaited and well-delivered 2021 Monterey Jazz Festival (Sept. 24-26), with Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny as two of many legends present—and many more in making. Both music events were sold out long before the actual performances (also because both events were conducted fully outdoors). Jazz Fest organizers went head over heels ensuring public safety—selling only half of the usual number of tickets and screening people at the gates to the Fairgrounds, checking vaccination cards or proof of negative Covid test—practices that have since become the norm.
In visual arts, the most spectacular exhibit of the year was “Shadows from the Past: Sansei Artists and the American Concentration Camps,” which opened Sept. 9 at the Monterey Museum of Art. The exhibit told the story of eight Japanese-American artists, all directly addressing the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in 1941, as a consequence of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It also mixed visual stimulation with historically inconvenient questions.
“The community has been so resilient,” says MMA’s executive director Corey Madden. So has the museum, with staff using extra time when not open to the public to restructure and develop creative, permanent digital ways to access the museum.
Under the circumstances, Madden is happy with the year. “We had so many visitors, so much praise,” she says.
When it comes to literature, perhaps the most locally consequential book of the year will turn out to be The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America, written by University of Illinois English professor Catherine Prendergast. Published on Oct. 12, this narrative nonfiction book rewrites the foundational myths of Carmel as a artist-friendly, feminist-friendly colony of open-mided bohemians. Instead, it reveals the capitalistic motivations of writer George Sterling, who was working for Carmel Development Company as something of an early influencer—trying to sell the idea of Carmel as an artist colony, even if the idea was slow to catch on, and created a lot of suffering for those involved. That included affairs (a lot of them), destructive alcoholism and multiple suicides. Prendergast revisits this era with an unvarnished look at the ugly parts and a feminist approach to the stories of the women whose papers had been largely forgotten.
And sometimes even big blockbuster movie releases have a local angle—this was the case on Oct. 22 when Marina-based Byron Merritt (grandson of author Frank Herbert) hosted a premier of the new movie Dune and was there to watch it with the community. When interviewed in October, Merritt said about Herbert: “He was a very brilliant man. I remember his massive library in Washington state. He had sci-fi, but also sociology and other topics. He was a voracious reader, a speed reader, too. He would finish a book in three hours.”
Of course, this year taught us that Covid’s viral momentum doesn’t go in just one direction. As new variants loom, and other parts of the country and world are experiencing renewed lockdowns, there’s the possibility that all the tentative fun might disappear again. That said, venues and performers and event producers have also learned skills and tools to help us adapt. It might not be quite clear what the immediate future of arts and entertainment looks like, but it is clear that there’s the will and creativity to figure it out. As Beth Bowman, managing director of the Sunset Center, told the Weekly in September: “We’re all willing to do what it takes.”