Mystery pervades plans for Philadelphia arts festival

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The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts was christened at a news conference yesterday with the acronym PIFA and promises of a citywide arts extravaganza to run from April 7 to May 1, 2011. It will include 100-plus local arts groups celebrating and emulating the artistic convergence experienced in Paris between 1910 and 1920.

The logo - a cube bearing the festival's name and poised at a gravity-defying angle - is meant to convey what festival director Edward Cambron called "tension and balance."

"We're making history today," said Mayor Nutter, hailing the event as a breakthrough for what he called "the arts-and-culture-economy community."

Most of the festival's programming, guided by artistic producer Barbara Silverstein, won't be announced until April 7 - exactly a year before the gathering's opening - in conjunction with first-day ticket sales for major events. Cambron did confirm an "anything can happen" concert featuring the Philadelphia rap group the Roots and a yet-to-be-announced French torch singer. Also, Stravinsky's 1920 theater piece Pulcinellawill be performed in Verizon Hall by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Pennsylvania Ballet, choreographed by the Boston Ballet's forward-looking Jorma Elo.

Another festival harbinger was a live performance at the media announcement featuring members of the orchestra playing an excerpt from Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat in a mash-up collaboration with two local DJs, Dave P and DJ Statik, who added dance tracks and other effects.

A few details slipped out. New-music ensemble Relache will collaborate with the celebrated French violinist/composer Regis Huby. The Pennsylvania Girlchoir will be part of a newly commissioned work by Thomas Pasatieri. Other details were, at times, held with almost comic secretiveness. A Curtis Institute of Music representative at the event refused to even confirm the conservatory's participation in the festival.

The announcement's seemingly backward procedure - unveiling packaging before content - was meant to create an overarching awareness, to be followed by independent announcements from the participating arts groups. In the coming days, the one-story-high über-cube, designed by the Red Tettemer advertising agency, will be placed at Broad and Spruce Streets; its image will be used in advertising.

The festival idea originally was hatched by Kimmel Center president and chief executive Anne Ewers about three years ago, while she was being interviewed for her current position: When asked how the center's resident arts groups could work together toward a single purpose, her answer was "a festival." A later meeting with an Annenberg Foundation representative inspired a $10 million grant from Leonore Annenberg, sealed during her final illness while she was treated at the Mayo Clinic, that made it possible to expand the festival to a citywide event.

Previous attempts to create an interdisciplinary arts festival have included the conceptually nebulous Festival Mythos in the early 1990s. Further back, in the 1930s, conductor Leopold Stokowski produced spectacular stagings of Stravinsky ballets with the Philadelphia Orchestra - perhaps more in line with PIFA's Parisian-foment theme.

In its current incarnation, the festival is conceptually open-ended - also involving fashion, food, drink, and the visual arts - but anchored by big-ticket events meant to inspire tourism, both nationally and internationally. Ewers reported that she was working with the French Embassy to create overseas visibility.