Audience Interview: Kentucky Performing Arts Kim Baker

Kentucky Performing Arts’ family of venues are the primary performance spaces for several major art groups in Louisville including PNC Broadway in Louisville, Louisville Orchestra, Louisville Ballet and more. The KPA venues are The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, the Brown Theatre and Old Forester’s Paristown Hall, Louisville’s newest, state-of-the-art performance venue.

KPA venues are currently closed due to the COVID-19 social distancing protocols.

We caught up with KPA President and CEO, Kim Baker, to see how they are doing amid the current situation.

This is an excerpt of the full interview. To read it in its entirety, visit Audience502.com.

KPA President & CEO Kim Baker

Douglas Dreisbach: Tell me about your role at KPA and some of your top priorities. Have any of those priorities changed since the COVID-19 pandemic?

Kim Baker: My responsibilities mainly include working with our board to create a vision for KPA and then developing the strategy that supports it. So, as you might imagine, right now we’re in close contact with trying to figure out what we need to do for the future of the organization.

Leadership is a big part of what I do, not only within KPA, but around the community, I’m having to be very accessible and be a part of bigger conversations. I also spend time staying connected to the national sector to be aware of what’s happening.

"At that moment, all I could think about was the health and safety of the staff, the volunteers, the artists and all of the audiences."

Now, everything is accelerated, and it’s very timely. So very practically, I have to ensure that KPA remains healthy through this time period and that we come back strong when the virus passes and we can reopen our doors.

DD: When stages around the world went dark, what were some of your first thoughts, and looking back, were those thoughts accurate?

KB: I don’t remember the exact moment that it happened, but we really started increasing our cleaning regimen and making sure we had the right cleaning supplies initially. Then I remember across the country, that certain governors were just closing down places with gatherings of over like 300, and then it went down to 100, and then it went to 50 and 10. In a matter of hours, we went from, “This is coming. It hasn’t gotten here yet” to, “It’s here.”

At that moment, all I could think about was the health and safety of the staff, the volunteers, the artists and all of the audiences.

DD: Being the house for so many great organizations, how do you decide when to cancel or postpone a performance or show?

KB: We are staying in close communication with the groups who use KPA venues as well as the promoters that come in. We’re really just trying to plan out far enough where we can. For example, Anastasia is one of the shows that had to move, and they’ve got a time that’s slotted in August. We’re moving a lot of events, and we’re rescheduling a lot of events. We have been creating a lot of “Plan Bs” so that if we’re not able to be open, we can push those a little later into the season. We continue to stay very flexible, stay in close communication with a lot of the renters for the center itself.