Culture in the time of corona: Virtual Concerts, Museums and Activities
All around the world, cultural events are being canceled due to the coronavirus. But artists, concert halls, museums, and many more are now challenging the virus by opening its doors with virtual tours and concerts. Here are asome some of the virtual cultural offers:
Digital concert halls
Opera companies and orchestras from Berlin and New York to Seoul have been live-streaming concerts.
Some are also offering free access to digital catalogues of past performances.
The Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall is now free for everyone.
New York’s Met Opera announced it would stream free encores of past performances from its Live in HD series on its website. The Nightly Met Opera Streams kicked off on 16 March with a 2010 performance of Bizet’s Carmen.
Some artists have been giving free online concerts. Pop singer James Blunt went ahead with his concert in Hamburg, Germany, live-streaming his performance in an empty venue to fans around the world.
Pianist Igor Levit used Twitter to give a performance from his Berlin apartment.
Virtual museums
With many museums announcing temporary closures, the digital world offers a way to explore culture from home.
Google’s Arts & Culture platform has partnered with 1,200 leading museums and archives to show their exhibits online and offer virtual tours. according to WEFORUM.
Among the big names included on the platform are New York’s MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim; the Musee D’Orsay in Paris; the Tate Modern and the British Museum in London; and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Some museums also have their own virtual tours, including the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Vatican Museum in Rome, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.
Others also share images and information about their collections under the Instagram hashtag #MuseumFromHome.
Field tours to zoos, cultural sites and space
You can find over 30 filed tours in this link to different virtual field tours. Also you can take a short tour to some American farms which are providing virtual tours from this link.
For 24 hours, watch actors perform on Instagram
We can’t go to the theater together right now, so the 24 Hour Play Festival is going live on social instead.
The 24 Hour Play Festival is a popular event held by theater companies across the world, from Broadway to semi-professional to student-run. It’s something of a creative exercise for both playwrights and actors — a challenge that requires an original piece of theater to be written and performed within a 24-hour time limit.
