Four years ago, I heard about a wedding. Lincoln Center — home to the Metropolitan Opera, the Philharmonic, and the Ballet — had decided to host a wedding for any New Yorkers whose weddings had been canceled or interrupted by COVID-19. It was July, 2022, and 500 couples showed up. They walked down the aisle together into Damrosch Park, in everything from wedding gowns to matching Hawaiian shirts to ice skating uniforms. The Philharmonic brass played, and a rabbi, a pastor, and an imam blessed the marriages. Every couple received a bouquet and a ribbon to tie together (tying the knot, literally) and vows printed on paper with the lyrics to Stevie Wonder’s “As.”
As I read about this unusual role for Lincoln Center to play, I thought to myself, someone in that institution is really thinking. Someone is really paying attention to what people actually need. Someone is dreaming in there.
It turns out that someone is Shanta Thake. And she joined us this week on Group Life as my latest guest in our series on gatherings, THE BREAKDOWN. Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and I asked her to join us on GROUP LIFE for a BREAKDOWN of this massive, collective, public wedding. How do you run one of the most prestigious arts institutions in the world without becoming calcified? How do you use the weight of an institution to serve people who have never felt like it was for them? How do you know when to end something that everyone loves?
GROUP LIFERS can watch the full replay above.
Here are 6 ideas from our conversation about how to think like a public designer.
1. Start with the need in front of you. During the pandemic, when people couldn’t gather for the ballet, the opera, or a show, Lincoln Center found itself asking an unusual question: Should we be a polling place? Should we be a vaccine site? Should we give out food? Underneath them was a larger one: What are we for? And, what does the city need more than ever? And the idea of hosting a wedding for couples whose weddings had been interrupted came from seeing firsthand what people’s lived experiences were. And, realizing, we have space! We have gorgeous music! We are prestigious! People would want to get married at Lincoln Center! For free.
2. The best hosts think like guests. During the pandemic, Thake missed being an audience member. Being an audience member, she explained, sharpens her attention to the experience of entering a room, of what it feels like when a place is for you or not, whether or not you get the norms or they’re impossible to decode. As Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center, she still asks these questions as they figure out what to offer the public: What does it feel like to walk in not knowing the rules? What does someone need to feel like their presence matters? The best hosts are often the best guests. They carry their experience as an audience member into every room they design.
3. Spaces teach us what they can hold. Before joining Lincoln Center, Thake worked at the Public Theater for almost two decades. And for a decade, was responsible for all programming of the beloved cabaret inside the Public, called Joe’s Pub. Joe’s Pub, she explained, is shaped like an accordion. It’s designed so that audiences are practically at the artists’ feet. It is an intimate room. And so, no matter who is coming into that space, the show became a cabaret. So she would let the room teach her what it needed, what it allowed, and what it inspired. That proximity changes what artists did on stage. People who said they never told stories between songs suddenly start telling stories. The room creates the permission. Good gatherers pay attention to what a space is already asking for and help an artist into its essence.
4. To change people’s perceptions of a massive institution, go big. When Lincoln Center installed a green lawn on its plaza during the pandemic, it changed how New Yorkers used its outdoor space. The green changed people’s perception of who could be there, Thake said. The plaza had always been pristine, formal, a place to be showcased. The lawn brought whimsy, and people came and stayed. It even shifted how the people who worked at Lincoln Center understood what they were doing and who they were for, she explained. If you want to change people’s perception of an institution, you cannot do it incrementally; make something big enough to interrupt the existing image, Thake advised.
5. Create rituals that mark the moment. The Wedding wasn’t a legal ceremony, yet every detail was designed to help couples feel that something meaningful had transpired. Couples processed down an aisle. They received bouquets. They tied ribbons together. A rabbi, pastor, and imam offered blessings. Thake shared, “We wanted people to feel like they were getting married even though it wasn’t a legal ceremony.”
6. Know when the party is over. After four years, Lincoln Center is taking a pause on The Wedding this year. Not because it wasn’t working, but because it was. People were coming back every year, and the same couples were returning. But they paused and asked: Is this still meeting a need, or have we built a ritual that has run its course, and is now keeping insiders inside? The job, she said, is to constantly ask: who hasn’t found their way here yet? How do we use what we have to reach the widest possible city? This year, instead of The Wedding, Lincoln Center launched a community choir called Come and Sing, which is open to anyone, no experience required. The gathering changes shape, but the question driving it doesn’t.
During the pandemic, I remember walking down the street and seeing a mother drop her baby’s bottle. My instinct was to bend down, pick it up, and hand it back to her. Instead, I hesitated. I still remember the feeling. In a matter of weeks, something that had always felt automatic, like moving toward another person to help, had become something to reconsider.
We have been somatically retrained over years of pandemic fear to lean away from each other and physically distance ourselves. And that undoing takes practice, too.
Thake, inside one of the most storied institutions in the country, is helping people practice being together again and celebrating that we can. And the question she keeps asking is one I think all of us — whether we run institutions or host dinner parties, team meetings, or community events — need to keep asking, too: How do we teach people to be together again? And how do we celebrate that?
I’m curious: Has there been a public space, institution, concert, or plaza that hosted something that surprised you? And in so doing, made you feel like you belonged somewhere you didn’t expect to?
As always,
Priya
