Lincoln Center will hold its second straight Summer for the City festival that puts a greater emphasis on diverse offerings while still including classical music programs
NEW YORK -- Lincoln Center will hold its second straight Summer for the City festival that puts a greater emphasis on diverse offerings while still including classical music programs.
The large disco ball and dance floor that marked the first festival last summer will return. Lincoln Center announced Monday that the festival will run from June 14 to Aug. 12 and currently is set to include 193 events, including 50 on the plaza dance floor, 37 in Damrosch Park and 30 in renovated David Geffen Hall, which reopened last October.
The speakeasy that opened in a driveway last summer, called Underground at Jaffe Drive, will more than double in size and expand to area that had been used as a Geffen construction staging area.
“We have a lot more overlapping programing so when there’s something on Damrosch in the bandshell, we'll also have something on the dance floor,” said Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer. “I love that energy when there’s all of these different audiences coming and intermingling.”
Thake said 70% of audiences that attended last summer's Mostly Mozart performances were first-time visitors to Lincoln Center.
“Free and choose-what-you-pay ticketing was wildly successful in terms of bringing new audiences to Lincoln Center,” she said. “This idea of taking down the silos between our festivals and instead just having one banner that really is about meeting New York with what it needs right now is is important.”
The festival includes “Parable of the Sower,” an opera by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel; Louis Langrée’s 21st and final season as Mostly Mozart music director; the National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival as part of Pride Month; and Korean Arts Week that includes K-pop bands, a Korean indie music.
