Thu, Oct 5th, 2023 - 9:43am
May 06, 2020 - 12:41pm | By Chris Larson
While the lights are dark for now at entertainment venues across the Untied States, promoters like Jade Presents, a Fargo-based concert promoter, hopes that the normalcy seen prior to March will happen sometime in the near future.
Jade Nielsen, President and founder of Jade Presents, tells WZFG Radio that promoters across the country never thought coronavirus would affect them. But, one day in March, that all changed.
“We went from 100 miles per hour to a dead stop,” Nielsen told Scott Hennen on his daily What’s On Your Mind radio program. “We started to get calls from agents and artists to cancel events, so we spent from late March to mid-April rescheduling events.”
While promoters are patiently waiting to see what the future holds, and when the state opens mass gatherings back up, some larger events are looking at dates in 2021 “just to be safe.” In addition, some events, scheduled for June of 2020, have now been rescheduled to June 2021, a concept that is concerning to Nielsen.
“Do they know something I don’t know that there is not going to be any more concerts in 2020,” Nielsen questioned.
But his hope is to see a state of normalcy come August. He says concerts will have “a new normal” when the country opens them up. For example, there have been talks about selling venues to 50 percent capacity and keeping people six feet apart. However, Nielsen says these concepts are “not financially feasible.”
Holding out hope for guidance soon, Nielsen says he has heard, from other sources, that the state is going to be rolling out mass gathering plans in the near future.
WZFG News reached out to Governor Doug Burgum’s office in regard to possible mass gathering plans. Spokesman Mike Nowatzki says he doesn’t anticipate the guidance coming out in this afternoon’s press conference.
