After more than two years of turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center will host a festival this summer to help heal New York City.
Called Summer for the City, the festival takes place in 10 outdoor spaces and three indoor stages on campus from mid-May to mid-August and is programmed around themes of rejoicing, reclaiming and remembering. It’s also part of Lincoln Center’s effort to rethink its image as an exclusive bastion of classical music and appeal to a younger, more diverse audience.
The center plans to feature more popular music and install a large disco ball, 3 meters in diameter, which will hang over a dance floor in the center’s main square.
“I hope we make space for people to find their neighbors again, find each other again and find their own inner artist,” Shanta Thake, artistic director of the center, said in an interview. “And to really be in full body with other New Yorkers and come back together as a city.”
The festival, expected to include more than 300 events and 1,000 performers, is the first under Thake, who joined Lincoln Center last year with a mission to expand the appeal of classical music and ballet into genres such as hip-hop, poetry and song writing.
This year’s programming opens with a massive sing-along at the Josie Robertson Plaza, featuring the Young People’s Chorus of New York, led by Francisco J. Núñez, and featuring classics such as “This Little Light of Mine” and Elton John’s “Your song.”
Two versions of Mozart’s Requiem will be offered in August – a traditional one presented by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and a reimagined dance version, “Requiem: Fire in the Air of the Earth,” choreographed by Kyle Abraham and performed by his company, AIM, with electronic musician Jlin.
Summer in the City will bring together downtown’s festivals, including the discontinued Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival, which has been largely suspended since 2020.
The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform six pairs of concerts this summer, including a free opening program in July conducted by the ensemble’s permanent conductor, Louis Langrée, with Conrad Tao as soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in blue.” (Tao will also play the William Grant Still solo “Out of the Silence” from “Seven Traceries”.)
Thake, the former artistic director of the Public Theater where she ran the cabaret-style Joe’s Pub for a decade, said she hoped to increase audiences for Mostly Mozart by integrating it with Lincoln Center’s other summer offerings.
“What we’re experimenting with this year is breaking down our internal silos,” she said. “They’re all under the same banner, and this is a Lincoln Center audience that’s very broad, and we’re going to see how that works.”
Summer for the City aims to build on Restart Stages last year, when the center hosted small-scale outdoor performances, to get artists back to work after months of pandemic cancellations. According to Lincoln Center, that series attracted more than 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of whom were first-time visitors.
The disco ball is the centerpiece of the Oasis, an outdoor stage designed by costume and set designer Clint Ramos, which will host live music and dance parties throughout the summer.
In June, Jazz at Lincoln Center, embracing a New Orleans tradition, will lead a second-line procession from Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center, to mourn those who have died since the start of the pandemic. And in July, the center will host ‘Celebrate LOVE: A (Re)Wedding’, a ceremony for couples who have canceled or rolled back their marriage in the past two years, with live music and a reception on the dance floor.
The arts, Thake said, “speak to all the deep trauma we have all experienced collectively and also bring so much joy and revitalization that the city needs.”