Morning Edition; Emily Fronkowski

It's Morning Edition on 89.9K RPS. The coronavirus pandemic has changed everything about how we live, but that is in stopping local arts organizations from holding events online. To tell us about some of the new art opportunities that are available during the stay-at-home order in Missouri, it's Director of Connected Culture Emily Frunkowski. And she joins us now. Thank you for joining us on Morning Edition. Thanks for having me. You know, it's not that long ago that I would get your monthly Connected Culture event email. It was packed with events throughout the area. So many things to do. And we have beautiful spring weather. There are still events taking place. And could you fill in full of sun on some of them? Yeah, definitely. Usually our list is very, very extensive. Even though we are mostly at home during this time and they aren't gathering to go to performance, they're going to take a paint class. You can still get really creative at home. We're really lucky that our art and cultural community in the Joplin area has a lot of creative alternatives that they've turned to instead of their usual programming.

So if you tune into Connected Culture via our website or our biweekly emails or even monthly emails, you'll see a list of all those creative alternatives that you can take apart in at home. Those kind of things include take, you know, create to go kits from Create and Sip in downtown Joplin. You'll also see downloadable coloring books from post art library and some others that features historic Joplin women that really help shape the community. You'll even see potentially some theatrical productions available via Facebook Live and swing dancing, at home that you can take part in. So it's really important to still lean on the arts during this time. I wanted to ask you also about the status of the 2020-2021 Currents Up series. Last year, the first performance of the series was in late October. It was early to how is the Currents Up series shaping up?

You know, we were incredibly fortunate that we finished out the 2019-2020 series in early March before the COVID-19 pandemic really hit our area and became such a serious situation. We ended our season with the choir of men, which is amazing show that everyone had so much fun with. We've been creating our 2020-2021 season. For some time now, we had a few contract signs. One, you know, one disappointment was that one of the shows that we were going to start out with, in September or so, they usually go into pre-production in May and we're unable to because of this. So that particular one will not be happening this year, maybe next year. So all hope is not lost, but our season is coming together and we're still going on with it. And hopefully soon we will start communicating what that will entail. But obviously, we're taking a lot of precautions and just learning and listening to other

performing arts groups. We're part of kind of a networking group called the Plains Presenters. And we have weekly Zoom meetings. So we all talk about, you know, what is this going to look like when we go back to the new normal or whatever normal we're calling it now. So we're taking all of that in and just kind of figuring out what the 2020-2021 season experience is going to look like. But connected culture is definitely going to have a wonderful curtains up series. We're really excited about it. And finally, the Herium Cornell Arts and Entertainment Complex. A lot of excitement around that before COVID-19 and the pandemic became the big news story across the world. What's the status of that? Is a construction being pushed back at all or is it still on track? Yeah, we are definitely not delayed at all. Currently, we're working on schematic design. And we're full steam ahead actually today. I have a three hour meeting just to go over kind of

interiors for the building. But it's just as active as always. COVID-19 is not going to postpone us at all. And we're looking forward to maybe releasing a little bit more information about the Cornell Complex very soon. So keep your eyes out on our social media and our website for more information about that. And then you can always learn more or even make a donation during this time at Cornellcomplex.org. Thank you for sending your time this morning. Anytime.