A New Lincoln Center Festival Puts Contemporary Dance Center Stage
In a fragile artistic ecosystem, the inaugural Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival is working to give the dance genre a platform to thrive. The festival is the headline event for the new Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance, an initiative made possible by a large gift from philanthropists Lynne and Richard Pasculano. This summer, the multi-week festival will put contemporary dance center stage at Lincoln Center Plaza, featuring indoor and outdoor performances, workshops, and more. Following the summer program, the festival will continue in January, establishing a twice-yearly cadence.
Pasculano Collaborative director Donald Borror, Lincoln Center director of contemporary programs Meiyin Wang, and guest curator Kyle Abraham created a festival lineup of productions that are diverse in their origins—and in their approaches to contemporary work. They include Yinka Esi Graves’ The Disappearing Act, which excavates the history of flamenco and its African influences; Jeremy Nedd’s from rock to rock…aka how magnolia was taken for granite, which delves into communal joy through Milly Rock; Sung Im Her | Her Project’s 1 Degree Celsius, an exploration of the human body and its relationships to the natural and urban world; Rachid Ouramdane’s TORDRE, which takes viewers through a journey of identity and personal expression; and Akram Khan’s Thikra: Night of Remembering, as part of the final tour for Khan’s company.
“When we think about the role of curation in all of this, the guiding light that we have is asking the question ‘What is contemporary dance?’ ” Borror says. “[We’re using] the festival as a current snapshot of what asking that question looks like, knowing that the answer will always be different and is definitely not definitive.”
Shanta Thake, chief artistic officer at Lincoln Center, adds that the festival reinforces the idea that contemporary dance deserves to be produced at scale. “Lincoln Center is such a big platform,” she says. “I think the [contemporary] dance community deserves and hasn’t had much access to [it].”
The Pasculano Collaborative is considering the future of contemporary dance, too. “We are working on several commissions and hopefully a robust pipeline of commissions through the lifecycle of the work that we’re doing,” Borror says. That includes support for local, national, and international artists and expanding the contemporary-dance canon. The festival will feature a professional-development cohort, giving early-career artists the opportunity to “lift the hood of the car and see what’s underneath,” Borror says, “and have generative, constructive conversations with other early-career professionals about what it is that the field is facing right now.”
Borror emphasizes that collaboration is an important feature of the Pasculano initiative, and the new festival will complement existing programming at Lincoln Center. This summer’s collaborations include an exhibition chronicling the history of contemporary dance, created with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and displayed in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall.
Making the festival accessible is another top priority. “We’ve changed our entire ticketing model at Lincoln Center over the last few years to be free and choose what you pay,” Thake says. Thake and Borror hope the change will help the festival engage new audiences as lifelong supporters of contemporary dance.
Borror and Thake want the Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival to unite people from across the city and beyond. “Post-pandemic, dance is critical to how we can come together,” Thake says. “[It’s] a way that we can literally connect to one another, literally notice each other’s bodies and celebrate.”
