A good New Year’s Letter certainly gives the necessary boost for a hopeful start to the new year. Tom (our Director) dusted off his goose feather and wrote a letter:
“What can we wish for in 2022?” It’s a frequently asked question these days. “Good health, because that’s the most important thing”, is the most frequently heard answer.
Now that we’re entering our third year of Covid, good health remains a precious thing that we truly wish for you all, dear AB newsletter reader!
But do you feel something else gnawing at you? We won’t make it through with only good health any more... We would like that little extra. A moment of happiness, a fine evening, a concert maybe? We can’t read your thoughts of course, but it is not without reason that you subscribe to our newsletter and so we wouldn’t be surprised if you miss live music as much as we do...
After briefly dreaming in the autumn of 2021 that the worst had passed, Omicron threw a spanner in the works. At first we were only allowed to work for 200 concertgoers, then even that was forbidden. Afterwards, the Council of State recalled that last decision by the Consultation Committee, which allowed us to open again for maximum 200 people. Open, closed, open, closed, ... We felt more like the ball in a game we don’t define the rules for and, unfortunately, no longer understand. It is also impossible for a professional music venue like AB to keep changing course at such short notice. And so we’re closed for now. Certainly until 28 January 2022.
What happens after that? Your guess is as good as ours. Even though our concert calendar is jam-packed, it is quite possible that we will again have to move or cancel shows. Quite a few international acts on our programme are starting to fiddle with their tour schedules as well... It was and is a difficult moment in time.
I’d like to make a big shout out to all the AB colleagues. No matter how frustrating it is to make all the changes, over and over again, and to see little to no return on investment, time and time again I see a passionate team scraping together all its courage and getting to work.
A second shout out I make to you, dear visitor to AB! You too have dealt in the blows: tickets are being postponed time and again, concerts get cancelled, all sorts of safety regulations make our threshold much higher than we ourselves would like and for the time being your patience is not being rewarded. Yet we receive a great deal of support from our audience and that helps. That our visitors’ hearts are in the right place, is apparent from the many donations for the New Year’s Eve dinner for the homeless, organised together with HOBO.
So we will continue in 2022. We will get up and stand tall, we will plan and re-plan, we will combine faith that things will get better with hope that you will keep on following and supporting us in 2022.
So see you soon, in AB!
Tom Bonte
Brussels, 13 January 2022
