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The art of knowing New York
By Andrew Seguin
Each year, Class 2 girls complete a study on New York City and, block by block, become more familiar with the metropolis in which they live. Of course, no study of this city would be complete without examining the role that the arts play in its makeup. After all, New York is where the world’s finest artists, dancers, musicians and actors continually converge to explore, or to be explored in, its museums, concert halls and performance spaces.
Lincoln Center, as Class 2 learned recently, has long been one of the premier cultural institutions not only in New York, but also in the world. The girls visited it for a behind-the-scenes tour of the performance spaces — Avery Fisher Hall, the New York State Theater and the Metropolitan Opera House — that the New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and Metropolitan Opera call home.
Fittingly, the students watched an actual dance performance before delving into the history and features of the parts of Lincoln Center in which dance is performed. “Dance is not TV,” Jody Oberfelder, the choreographer of Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects, told them. “It’s dancers doing things that relate to physics.” The girls then witnessed a series of dances in which human bodies mimicked machines, becoming fulcrums and catapults. The girls even did some movement of their own, first in their chairs and then onstage as part of an improvisatory human chain.
Beginning the visit with a visceral introduction to Lincoln Center’s offerings provided a nice contrast to the facts the girls amassed on the tour that followed. They learned that Avery Fisher Hall, where the New York Philharmonic was rehearsing, could be described as an egg inside of a box: The ovular theater is surrounded by eight-foot-thick walls and a stage cushioned by layers of soundproofing to prevent New York’s exterior cacophony from intruding on Bach. They found out that the floor of the State Theater, where the City Ballet was rehearsing, is a “sprung” floor, bouncy enough to add years to a dancer’s otherwise brief career by treating his or her legs gently. They also learned that the backstage of the Metropolitan Opera is the size of a football field so that extravagant sets can be built, stored and rotated in and out of productions.
And the titular Lincoln? Not Honest Abe, but a farmer who originally owned the land where Lincoln Center now stands.
As part of their continuing study on New York, the girls will transform these nuggets of information into questions that will accompany a board game about the city. To advance, they’ll have to know the features of New York that they’ve been learning about, which, as they’re discovering, is in itself an art.
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