A painting by student Samantha Zellner, Confidence, Each Time We Face Our Fear, We Gain Strength, Courage and Confidence in the Doing, will be in the art exhibition.

Sarasotans love the arts. So, too, do Novo Collegians. With COVID-19 having temporarily shuttered of our city’s theatres, museums and concert halls, we still crave the experience of attending live performances.

Since we can’t attend in person, let’s try attending virtually in real time.

A week from today, on Saturday, April 18 at 4 pm, New College students and dancers from Sarasota Contemporary Dance will participate in a virtual National Water Dance performance. Across the country, participants will live-stream their dance on social media as part of a nationwide effort to draw attention to and action on water issues. This year’s event is focuses on the climate crisis. In this time of COVID-19 and social distancing, the dance provides a visible opportunity for participants to create a community that reaches out for change.

New College’s Art Department will present the Senior Thesis Art Exhibit in an online virtual platform Monday, April 20 through Friday, May 15. The Embodied Mind will be a collection of student paintings that focus on wellbeing, diversity, and community. Our graduating students have created these intensely colorful and thought-provoking works of art that explore topics ranging from mental illness to LGBTQ+ community pride. In past years, we celebrated our art students’ accomplishments at a reception in our Isermann Gallery. This year we will honor them through this virtual exhibit.

New Music New College is planning to live-stream the JACK Quartet concert (originally scheduled for last Saturday in the Mildred Sainer Pavilion) at a future date. Named the 2018 Ensemble of the Year by Musical America, the quartet will perform Sky Macklay’s Many Many Cadences, Jason Eckhardt’s Testify (a world premiere), and Helmut Lachenmann’s String Quartet no. 3 “Grido”. Please check the NMNC website and Facebook page for more details. In the meantime, there are more than 85 videos of earlier NMNC performances on YouTube.

You can approach these performances in two different ways. One rues the lost ambiance that would have come from physically gathering to watch an event, another views yourself as experimenting with the artists in a physically distanced gathering. I vote for the second, citing New Music New College founder, Prof Steve Miles, who has argued for years that artistic performance draws essentially on audience engagement. Artists experiment, and COVID has given us a chance to experiment with them. Let’s take advantage of it.

Dr. Donal O’Shea is president of New College of Florida.

A painting by student Samantha Zellner, Confidence, Each Time We Face Our Fear, We Gain Strength, Courage and Confidence in the Doing, will be in the art exhibition.