Lincoln Center announces return of expansive, inclusive ‘Summer for the City’ festival

Steve Smith

Published Apr 17, 2023

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A public space awash in floral designs

Evan Alexander for Lincoln Center

Steve Smith

Published Apr 17, 2023

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For the second consecutive summer, Lincoln Center is uniting all of its outdoor spaces and many of its indoor facilities for “Summer for the City,” the wide-ranging, maximally inclusive new seasonal arts series that debuted in 2022.

The festival, which runs from June 14 to August 12, aims for accessibility to the broadest possible range of visitors, while also emphasizing events representing a diverse range of art forms, idioms and styles. And David Geffen Hall, which closed last summer for renovation, is providing a flagship auditorium this year.

Highlights of this summer’s festival include the New York City premiere of “Parable of the Sower,” an opera by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon based on Octavia Butler’s novel; the final series of Mostly Mozart concerts under the leadership of Louis Langrée, now in his 21st and last season as music director; week-long celebrations of Korean Arts Week and the 50th anniversary of hip-hop’s birth; and an outdoor film series tied into “See Me As I Am,” an institution-wide celebration of trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard.

Also returning this year is a pricing gambit that proved successful last summer: pay-what-you-will ticketing for seated indoor events. The inaugural “Summer for the City” season brought more than 300,000 visitors to Lincoln Center, according to a media statement, and more than three quarters of those patrons had never previously reserved a ticket to any Lincoln Center presentation.

As in last year’s festival, accessibility and inclusion are paramount, including events planned by disability artistry guest curator Kevin Gotkin and presentations designed for differently abled audiences.

The biggest departure this year, says chief artistic officer Shanta Thake, is having multiple programs happening in close proximity. Last summer, if an event took place in the Damrosch Bandshell, the nearby plazas and the public space called The Oasis were kept dark.

“Most of the time this year, we actually flip that entirely,” Thake said. “If we have something happening on the dance floor, we really try to do something also in Damrosch” – for example, she suggests, a Film at Lincoln Center program using headphones. The idea is less about everything, everywhere, all at once than to foster opportunities for a visitor to discover new things and stray afield of expectations.

Underscoring the notion of mixing unanimity with discovery is a campus-wide visual transformation designed by director Clint Ramos. “His ability to transform people’s expectations of space and create these moments of joy and fun: to bring that into the overall design has been amazing,” Thake said.

The 10-foot disco ball that dominated the plaza will be back again this summer, surrounded with botanical and floral elements that permeate public spaces. “What we asked was, how do we create a festival that feels like you’re entering a different world when you step onto the Lincoln Center campus – and that you don’t keep getting interrupted in that experience?” Thake said. “You can continuously feel like you’ve escaped New York, in a way, and have moved into this totally different environment that’s incredibly vibrant and lush and magical.”

And the magic, she says, is meant to extend beyond show time, with dining options and public amenities that lend themselves toward lingering. “It’s not just a space to come in and see a show,” Thake said, “but a space that really is a home away from home.”

Check out a complete list of events and activities at summerforthecity.org.

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