Lincoln Center is known for the size of its theaters and concert halls: the stately, majestic Metropolitan Opera House with 3,800 seats; David Geffen Hall, glowing as New York Philharmonic fans arrive for an evening performance; the David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York Ballet and specially designed for dance.
With these rooms closed to public performances for almost a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center now looks beyond the walls of its travertine-clad buildings to another part of its 16-acre campus: the outdoor area.
Lincoln Center announced Thursday that it plans to create 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal rooms. This is the latest move in an effort to move small performances outside to bolster the performing arts in New York and get artists back to work after months of shutdown.
The comprehensive initiative, known as “Restart Stages”, kicks off on April 7 with a concert for healthcare workers. There are plans for a cabaret-style stage, a dedicated area for families with artistic activities for children, public rehearsal locations, an outdoor reading room set up in partnership with the New York Library for the Performing Arts, an outdoor area for a different type of Lincoln Center Ritual: Public Graduations held every spring and summer.
The program includes not only Lincoln Center organizations looking to host film screenings, concerts, and dance workshops, but also art institutions from across the city. Lincoln Center officials said it would work with groups like the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, the African Diaspora Institute of the Caribbean Cultural Center, Harlem Week and the Harlem Arts Alliance, the New York Korean Cultural Center, and the Weeksville Heritage Center alternately the outside areas.
Some of the performances will be broadcast live online, officials said, adding that more details will be released shortly.
Henry Timms, President of the Lincoln Center, said in an interview that he and other organization leaders had spent a lot of time thinking about how to use their “unique gift of the outside space” and how they could use it to “To create something” a driveway to an indoor performance. “
“This is a real opportunity to renew our work as an institution – to redefine our work,” said Timms. “The real opportunity now is for us to try, experiment,” he added, noting that he expected some of the ideas to become a permanent fixture in the years to come.
Thursday’s announcement comes as New York has started to give a taste of the artistic and cultural events that have long filled the city with great energy and creativity, not to mention economic activity.
Last weekend, musician Jon Batiste led a band through the Javits Center in the first of a series of “NY PopsUp” concerts announced by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, which will be held in a public-private partnership between state officials and the producers Scott Rudin and Jane Rosenthal. (Lincoln Center officials noted that their plans were developed in coordination with the concert series.) Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for an Open Culture program for the city that will allow outdoor performances on designated city streets in the spring.
It will be some time before the indoor live performances return. Three of the Lincoln Center’s largest affiliates – the Met Opera, the City Ballet, and the Philharmonic – hope to resume this fall. The Philharmonic plans to repeat last year’s NY Phil Bandwagon concerts, a program that picked up musicians around town in the spring.
But the pandemic is far from over. On Monday, the United States exceeded 500,000 known coronavirus-related deaths. In New York alone, the number has risen to over 46,000 with more than 1.6 million cases. A report released Wednesday by the State Comptroller said that arts, entertainment and recreation employment in New York City fell 66 percent year over year in December 2020 – the largest decline of any sector in the city’s U.S. economy .
Aware of the city’s bigger struggles, Lincoln Center said it would partner with the New York Blood Center and the Food Bank for New York City offer services such as blood drives and food distribution in addition to the arts program; The campus will also serve as a polling station for the upcoming mayor’s area code.
And in a refrain common to any organization, Lincoln Center officials emphasized that they had drawn up their plans with the involvement of public health experts.
Mr Timms said that the pandemic had helped “put a much more targeted focus on our citizen work in addition to our cultural work”.
And he said that Lincoln Center would be nimble and adapt when the rules changed to let in more visitors.
“We are ready to expand as soon as the governor and the city say we can,” said Timms. “We’re ready when it’s 20, we’re ready when it’s 50, we’re ready when it’s 400.”
