Since the whole COVID-19 started spreading, life has started taking another turn, with activities slowing down, stopping or getting postponed, major events that meant gathering large crowds like the UEFA Champions League, the NBA, and the Olympics were suspended for this year. Great theaters and museums had to shut their doors. Students and teachers had to be sent home until further notice.



Luckily for the world, we are in 2020 with good experience in live streaming and connecting together from all ends and corners of the world virtually. And thus, classes started taking place online with teachers and students connecting from home. Businesses continued to operate connecting employees using different technologies and apps, and even art schools started giving drawing and ballet classes online, creating competitions for kids and sending them their certificates digitally. Storytellers are also holding live streamed sessions for kids and adults to preserve the tradition.

This was good news for art lovers and avid culture seekers; as many key art institutes started either sharing their recorded events or allowing access to weekly shows and art collections. These included everything from operas, to theater plays, to films, museum tours, and library best sellers; making sure to give that individual or family at home, the luxury of transcending the physical space to find themselves in the setting of an opera in Florence, or a dance display in Paris or a Shakespeare act in London or an Arabic film in Beirut.

Opera companies and orchestras including New York’s Met Opera and the Berlin Philharmonic have been live-streaming concerts to audiences around the world.

Google’s Arts & Culture platform has partnered with 1,200 leading museums and archives to show their exhibits online and offer virtual tours.

In the UK, the BBC Arts announced its new Culture In Quarantine programme. The channel has changed the BBC Arts website to Culture in Quarantine for the duration of the current crisis. “The idea is to help surface and showcase work on the BBC,” they explained.

The new two-month National Theatre at Home programme films will be shown at 7pm every Thursday to try to recreate, where possible, the communal viewing experience. They will then be available on demand for seven days.According to The Guardian,

Thursday night could become National Theatre night, as the company announced plans to broadcast some of its most popular productions for free during the lockdown.

​​

Oslo World, one of Europe’s leading venue festivals, that present a global outlook on today’s music scene with a special focus on music from Africa, Latin-America, Asia and the Middle East, also announced asking this year’s festival bookers around the world to share their top 20 songs for viewers to listen to by entering a map on their page. The festival is due to take place from October 27 – November 1 for the 27th consecutive year.

The Sundance Film festival created a Resources We Love page that includes a wide range of online projects, webinars and fund pockets, in addition to advice on how to deal with the pandemic, with the message “To make it a bit easier for everyone for the next few months, we are going to make all of our member webinars and master classes free to attend. We will also be adding a forum for your questions and concerns at this time where we encourage you to support one another, to tell your stories, and to be generous as always with listening and advice.”

In Lebanon, the film platform 𝐚𝐟𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐚 (our films), an initiative by a group of Arab filmmakers and film institutions, lead by Beirut DC, put together “some of the best, most thought-provoking and most independently-minded works of contemporary Arab cinema to enjoy for free.” During the COVID-19 lockdown and possibly further.

Amazon stepped into the game by announcing to provide full (and free) worldwide access to all its kids shows, commenting, “we swear we just heard the collective sigh of all parents everywhere.”

People can access the landing page for all free titles by visiting this link. Among the specials that are made available are programs such as The Dangerous Book for Boys, Lost in Oz, Just Add Magic, Pete the Cat, Costume Quest, Tumble Leaf, Bug Diaries, Creative Galaxy, Jessy & Nessy, Wishenpoof, Annedroids, Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, The Snowy Day, and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The streamer will also offer various seasons of the following PBS series: Arthur, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Odd Squad, Cailou, Cyberchase, and Dinosaur Train. The site listed.

Jordan’s Prime Minister, Dr. Omar Razzaz, once said at the launch of a collection of books especially created for refugee children that “imagination gives our children the escape they need to survive the world’s hardships, our children are in great need of the ability to dream.”

This crisis made that a necessity for all and that’s when the world art entities came to help.