Kennedy Center Will Showcase Arab Arts

Festival, 'Ragtime' Musical and Ballet Are Among '08-09 Season Highlights

The Arab world will be united. Various anniversaries will be duly commemorated. And two different "Ragtimes" will be exhumed, one a musical and the other a Balanchine ballet. These were among the highlights of yesterday's announcement of the Kennedy Center's 2008-09 season.

Next year, the center's annual package-tour festival takes on, rather than a single country, the 22 nations of the Arab League, from Egypt to Somalia. The three-week festival (Feb. 25-March 15) is called "Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World," and represents one of the center's most ambitious projects to date. It has a $10 million budget (well over the approximately $6 million for this year's Japan festival) and will entail, among other things, the construction of a souk on the Kennedy Center premises.

The program will bring in a number of dance groups, such as the Caracalla Dance Theater of Lebanon. Theater offerings include a play called "Alive From Palestine: Stories Under Occupation." Among the concerts is an evening of sacred music representing the broad range of religions actually present under the Arab umbrella.

The festival aspires to show "other sides of Arab people than people here are reading about in the newspaper," Michael Kaiser, the Kennedy Center's president, said in an interview before the announcement. "Art is a way of examining what their concerns are, what they're talking about."

Kaiser's low-key delivery yesterday may have sought to play down the potential controversy of bringing in some 500 people from countries that tend to raise eyebrows at the Department of Homeland Security (visa negotiations are already underway). The Palestinian play has already sparked concerns among donors.

All-American, by contrast, is the season-opening fanfare in September and October, 35 days of programming to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Congress's official approval of a national cultural center -- what one might call the Kennedy Center's conception. "Arts Across America" includes artists from every state of the union in an eclectic melange of events: performances of National Symphony Orchestra commissions from South Dakota, Tennessee, Kansas and Nevada (part of the NSO's American Residencies program); the maiden concert of the 105 Voices of History National Choir, with one member from each of the 105 Historically Black Colleges and Universities across the nation; and, on Sept. 21, a performance by the actor and rapper Mos Def.

Two other commemorations will celebrate 80th birthdays. The composer and conductor Andr¿ Previn will be feted on Jan. 31 with an NSO concert conducted by Previn himself and including his music. The 80th birthday of the jazz saxophonist Benny Golson will be marked on Jan. 24 by performers including Al Jarreau and Bill Cosby.

The musical "Ragtime," with music by Stephen Flaherty, directed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, is the flagship production in a theater season presented largely under the heading "Broadway: The Third Generation," which purports to focus on younger composers -- including many who were hailed in the late '80s as "the next generation," and have not all quite fulfilled their promise. Michael John LaChiusa, another member of the "Third Generation," will write the music for a new musical of "Giant" at Signature Theatre, funded by the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays.

And a special "Three Generations" event will reopen the Eisenhower Theater from its 17-month sleep, with excerpts from the Gershwins' "Girl Crazy" (first generation), Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's "Fiddler on the Roof" (second generation) and the 1997 "Side Show" by Henry Krieger and Bill Russell (third).

The other "Ragtime," Balanchine's, comes courtesy of the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, which in October will take over the reopened Eisenhower with seven performances including a reconstruction of this lost work and an ambitious essay of the "Liebeslieder Walzer."

Classic dance fares well in the coming season -- "classic" indicating a tendency toward the tried and true on both the ballet and contemporary sides of the program. "Contemporary" is used loosely, since most of the companies represent Grand Old Men and Women: Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor. Most notable is the return of Mark Morris to the Kennedy Center after more than a decade's absence with "Mozart Dances," performed with a live orchestra.

On the ballet side, the San Francisco Ballet comes in with new works commissioned for its own 75th anniversary. Also notable is the first appearance of the Bolshoi under its new director, Yuri Burlaka, in what Kaiser said is to be a yearly arrangement with the Kennedy Center, and forming an impressive lineup with the Kirov, American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet.