New York relief: Lincoln Center will perform outdoors from April
mainIt has been announced that Lincoln Center will create 10 outdoor performance spaces and stages to bring back concerts and ballet from April.
That’s the first good news New York has had in a year.
Lincoln Center will share Lincoln Center will share programming with Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Harlem Arts Alliance, Korean Cultural Center New York and Weeksville Heritage Center.
No mention of the New York Philharmonic or the paralysed Metropolitan Opera.
This is the sort of outdoor fare Lincoln Center presents every summer. This time it is starting earlier. But mild, sunny weather in New York comes late in Spring, and this may prove to be a bust.
Increasingly, New York major cultural organizations are devoting serious resources to ‘outreach’. But if this is what is considered outreach, it is more like pandering.
Note that the population of the Bronx (mentioned in the press release) is comprised of about 90% people of color, and Weeksville, in Brooklyn, also mentioned, is a neighborhood comprised of mainly Afro-Caribbean immigrants.
The Met is paralysed in the way dinosaurs faced another type of impact. The bigger the ship, the smaller the range of flexibility.
Very good news for NY indeed, these outdoor events. According to scientific findings, the virus is much less likely to pass from one person to another in the open air. It is closed spaces with no or bad ventilation where it is most happy to spread.
How about cities start building Billion-Euro post-Covid out-door concert spaces instead of Billion-Euro pestilence-propagating old-school concert halls?
Only ”POC”s allowed.
You read the headline and think: NY Phil, ABT, MET. Then you see…the type of programming that is coming from all major arts organizations and making Covid that much more unbearable.
The NY Phil is mentioned in all the Lincoln Center news I’ve seen: their probable continuation of their pop-up concerts in NYC. The Phil has been paying attention to the Johns Hopkins’s scientists who have studied the necessary distancing for musicians of various instruments. Six-foot distancing doesn’t cut it for certain instruments, especially the brass. They appear to be scrupulous in appearing in smaller orchestra configurations depending on the venue’s capability to be risk averse. (The latter for recording purposes only.)
“The Phil has been paying attention to the Johns Hopkins’s scientists…” Why?
With the heavy reliance on smaller outside organizations to supply the programming, not to mention its announced intention to host blood drives, distribute food to the needy, and serve as an election polling place, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts appears to be reinventing itself as a community center, along the lines of the 92nd Street Y, LCPA prexy Henry Timms’s previous employer. I admire the desire to contribute to the greater civic good at a time of great need, but I fear that it will ultimately come at the expense of the art. LCPA carries a major structural deficit as a result of its 2004 campus redevelopment, and especially with the current renovation of David Geffen Hall, it is not in a position to expand its offerings, only to replace them–with something it hopes will draw a more diverse audience beyond its core base of aging white Upper West Siders. Diversifying the audience is important, but it seems presumptuous (and condescending) to assume that non-white people won’t like Western classical art forms and would prefer only “heritage” programming. (To be clear, I’m not objecting to “heritage” programing, but something will be lost as this becomes the primary focus of the institution, to the exclusion of “legacy” programming.)
The Spring/Summer free outdoor program at the Met was always used to showcase community, regional, student groups and bands and non classical performances. Once I even saw a program of licensed subway musicians (these are performers who audition and receive licenses from the New York City subway system to busker for a couple of months in the subway) as part of the Lincoln Center outdoors program