Lincoln Center will head outside its closed theatres to perform

New York

LINCOLN Center is known for the grandeur of its theatres and concert halls: the stately, majestic Metropolitan Opera House, which seats 3,800; David Geffen Hall, aglow as New York Philharmonic fans file in for an evening performance; the David H Koch Theater, home to New York City Ballet and designed specifically with dance in mind.

But, with those spaces closed to public performances for nearly a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, Lincoln Center is now looking beyond the walls of its travertine-clad buildings to another part of its 16-acre campus: the outdoor space.

Lincoln Center has announced it plans to create 10 outdoor performance and rehearsal spaces, becoming the latest entrant in the effort to move small-scale performances outside to try to bolster the performing arts in New York and get artists back to work after months of shutdowns.

The broad initiative, known as "Restart Stages", will begin on April 7 with a concert for health care workers. There are plans for a cabaret-style stage, a dedicated area for families that will feature arts activities for children, rehearsal venues that will be open to the public, an outdoor reading room created in partnership with the New York Library for the Performing Arts and an outdoor space for another kind of Lincoln Center ritual: public school graduations held each spring and summer.

Programming will include not only Lincoln Center organisations - which plan to put on screenings, concerts and dance workshops - but also arts institutions from across the city. Lincoln Center officials said that it would partner with groups including the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Harlem Week and the Harlem Arts Alliance, the Korean Cultural Center New York and Weeksville Heritage Center, all of whch will take turns programming the outdoor areas.

Some of the performances will be streamed live online, officials said, adding that more details will be rolled out soon.

Henry Timms, president and CEO of the Lincoln Center, said in an interview that he and other organisation leaders spent a lot of time thinking about how to leverage their "unique gift of outdoor space" and considering how they might use it to "create an on-ramp to indoor performance".

"This is a real chance to renew our work as an institution - reimagine our work," Mr Timms said. "The opportunity for us now is actually for us to try to experiment," he added, noting that he expected some of the ideas to become permanent fixtures in the years ahead. NYTIMES