THE MANN’S COVID-19 RESPONSE 16

A fan’s homemade sign displayed in the audience during the Phoebe Bridgers concert on the Skyline Stage in 2021.

THE MANN’S COVID-19 RESPONSE

The Mann lost more than $23 million in earned and contributed gross income. While making tough choices to reduce all costs across the institution, we launched the Let the Music Play Resiliency Fund, a historic emergency fund to support our annual fund and the outstanding Education and Community Engagement programming. The COVID-19 pandemic caused worldwide disruption to events and programs, compelling the Mann to readdress how they interact with the community during times of social distancing and lockdown. Being an outdoor amphitheater, the Mann embraced this advantage and possibility and began to reimagine what it could provide to address city-wide needs. Throughout the pandemic, the Mann has offered its 22-acre campus as a COVID-19 testing site, voting location, food distribution community resource, and vaccine site.

As a community fixture, the Mann’s programming is irreplaceable to community members. Proudly, the Mann stepped up to provide engagement, community outreach, and ‘virtual’ inclusive education and community engagement programming to connect with young people by creating new partnerships and providing meaningful content. The following are key programs that took place during the pandemic:

• Mann Music Room: Created to virtually connect performers to audiences, home to home. Lessons were given by a wide variety of artists teaching a diverse array of topics. Lessons included, but were not limited to, conga, Bharatanatyam, veena, songwriting, guitar, cajon, and West African dance, along with themed video events for Hispanic Heritage Month, Martin Luther

King Day, and Pride Month. Over the duration of the program, the videos have been watched over 300,000 times creating a total engagement of over 45,000 people. • Motion & Music Academy: MMA functioned as a hybrid virtual program. The Mann Center campus served as a class site for dance, drumming, and choir, then pivoted to fully virtual in the winter. The choir class remained fully virtual during the pandemic lockdown, due to the activity of singing being one of the most dangerous in the spread of the virus. The MMA program ran from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM every Tuesday and Thursday. Dance and drumming students met in person on the Mann

Center campus in outdoor socially distanced in-person classes, COVID-19 protocols were in place. MMA students received a comprehensive skill-building arts education experience from the Mann’s dedicated cultural partners. Students learn the following: • Dance students learn a mix of classical ballet, the foundation to all major dance genres, and West African dance. The Mann is fortunate to have Philadelphia Ballet instructors lead MMA’s dance program. Students enrolled in dance, learned ballet techniques, and dance foundations. This provided a serious opportunity for these students to build viable dance skills despite the pandemic.