Live Music Photography: Summer for the City at Lincoln Center: Hip-Hop Week: Silent Disco feat. DJ Spinna and DJ Rashida 8/11/23
Lincoln Center’s second annual Summer for the City Festival is a the three month-long festival featuring hundreds of free events and thousands of performers celebration the vibrant and eclectic communities and cultures of New York. All New Yorkers are welcomed to the Lincoln Center campus to dance, fall in love, catch established and emerging artists and celebrate together through the facility’s long-standing traditions of social dance and classical music, along with newer traditions like a wedding for hundreds of couples and a New Orleans-styled second line procession to honor lives lost.
Speaking of celebrating New York’s vibrant and eclectic communities and cultures, Summer for the City hosted Korean Arts Week, the New York premiere of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the return of the BAAND Together Dance Festival, globalFest, the Mostly Mozart Festival and a week-long celebration of Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary.
Visionary artist Clint Ramos was ensiled to animate every inch of the campus throughout the summer, creating welcoming spaces with greenery, colorful botanicals, gorgeous artwork and 200 fake flamingos: The spaces include The Garden, Hearst Plaza, The Underground at Jaffe Drive, The Reading Room, Damrosch Park and The Dance Floor at Josie Robertson Plaza, the centerpiece of the festival, which hosts the city’s largest outdoor dance floor and an enormous glittering disco ball for social dance nights, performances and silent discos among others.
Last week, Lincoln Center was among countless sites across the city celebration Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary with a variety of events — including a silent disco night with DJ Spinna and DJ Rashida spinning straight fire that spanned several decades of hip-hop history. Of course, I took a few photos.
