01/08/2020
[Announcement on 2020 Charity Concert Cancellation ]
Due to the recent development of the pandemic, new government laws and a notification from our venue that they have revoked our rental agreement, we intend to not hold this year's charity concert.
Background:
We started planning a musical play based charity concert during February and have recruited 30+ crew members by March, before the end of term. In the meantime, we approached 15+ venues and negotiated a deal with last year's venue for a cost of ~20k. At that point, we believed that the pandemic would ease by September and planned to continue hosting it during September, though we were later deterred by the HK government's 4 person public gathering ban during April. Having decided our beneficiary, we decided to halt our progress during our 14 day quarantine and the weeks before our online exams.
As the pandemic eased in June and we finished our exams, we resumed planning. However, we noticed that we would have difficulty in financing our venue this year due to the likely reduction in audience numbers and sponsorship amount. We then decided to change the concert into a talent show/ livehouse based performance and invited other PASS societies to join. We successfully recruited UCLPASS and ManchesterPASS to help us and also Mockingbird to help us make this happen. Here, we were confident to have 100+ audience members join on that day. To further reduce costs, we approached three cheaper locations and luckily agreed to a venue rental at a secondary school for basically no cost. We also have contacted our beneficiary.
The third wave of the pandemic is amongst us now and is showing no signs of recovery. As such, the secondary school informed us that they will not be willing to let their venue out any more. The stringent measures launched by the government today also prohibits us from practicing our performances. As such, with the event and everyone's wellbeing in consideration, our confidence in holding a successful event during September is very low.
A few alternative measures were proposed by our committee members, to change to another form while keeping the goals of the concert intact (1. benefit charities 2. raise awareness for social issues 3. involve IC members)
Holding an online concert/campaign would not warrant any significant audience hence would not be able to generate money to donate to charity.
We also discussed performing to underprivileged groups instead of holding a concert for the masses. Judging how places e.g. elderly homes are closed, this would not be possible.
Moving the concert to the UK is unfeasible as the pandemic threat is likely to be looming until a wide vaccination programme. Also, our crew (also people from UCL and Manchester) is likely to be split between being physically in the UK and HK, which means little to no performers and audience members. Assuming everything is back to normal by Feb/March next year, any event during that time would clash with the Variety Show.
We hope you understand why we think that continue hosting a charity concert this year is extremely risky. We tried really hard to make this happen given the circumstances but we think that we should not proceed any more.
Thank you,
2020 Committee
