Lincoln Center Plans Yearlong 50th-Anniversary Celebration

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will announce today its plans for a yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary in 2009, including a variety of new commissions, concerts, and performances from its 12 resident organizations, as well as the launch of a digital time capsule and the first major exhibition of its history in a show at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.The programming will kick off on May 11, 2009, with the commemoration of the campus’s original groundbreaking ceremony, which featured President Eisenhower, and will end in May 2010 with a campus-wide open house.Festivities during the intervening months will range far in ambition and scope. Among the performance programming, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble will present a free concert in the renovated Guggenheim Bandshell in Damrosch Park. Choreographer Mark Morris will offer two new works featuring Mr. Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax.New York City Ballet will present a festival of new choreography and newly commissioned music for a festival in spring 2010. And New York City Opera will re-create Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s opera “Einstein on the Beach,” with choreography by Lucinda Childs.Other programming will extend beyond performing arts. The Film Society of Lincoln Center will offer 50 consecutive hours of film musicals over the Fourth of July weekend, and 50 consecutive hours of classic foreign films over Labor Day weekend.Still other projects will be participatory or community-based. The digital time capsule, which launches today, will allow the public to contribute text, images, and videos of their experiences with Lincoln Center. In spring 2009 Lincoln Center will partner with StoryCorps, the nonprofit audio preservation project. Parked at Josie Robertson Plaza, a StoryCorps MobileBooth — an Airstream trailer that houses a recording studio — will allow visitors to capture their memories of Lincoln Center’s first 50 years. The recordings will then be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.And beginning in 2009, $100,000 in scholarship money will be awarded to the first four graduating classes of a public school behind Lincoln Center’s campus, the Lincoln Center Institute’s High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry.“The dynamic programming that takes place across the Lincoln Center campus, 365 days a year, speaks to the power of the visionary public-private partnership that was forged 50 years ago,” the commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, Kate Levin, said in a statement.Besides the official programming, Lincoln Center’s 2009-10 year will feature three auspicious firsts: the inaugural seasons of the incoming general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera, Gérard Mortier, and the incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, and the first season programmed entirely by the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb.The anniversary programming comes in the midst of Lincoln Center’s ambitious renovation. Since March 2006, the campus has been consumed by a siege of scaffolding, construction crews, and cranes.The redevelopment project, designed by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will feature a reconfigured entryway along Columbus Avenue, cantilevered new studios for the School of American Ballet, and a new restaurant with a roof lawn. Renovations are expected to be completed in early 2011.

Lincoln Center Plans Yearlong 50th-Anniversary Celebration

Lincoln Center Plans Yearlong 50th-Anniversary Celebration

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