Explore by subject Arts, Drama & Culture History & Documentary How-to, Body & Spirit News & Public Affairs Science & Nature The Festival's Centerpiece, Setting The Stage, Hosted By Lynn Redgrave And Premiering Thursday, April 12, 9 P.M., Highlights Local Arts And Features Wynton Marsalis, Poet/Activist La Bruja, Architect David Rockwell, And Ballet Hispanico, Among Many Others From avant-garde filmmaking to groundbreaking performance art, Thirteen has a long and storied history of taking the road less traveled. Since the station first turned on its signal more than four decades ago, its producers and programmers have been eager to experiment with new technologies, explore untried forms, stretch the boundaries of content, and take creative risks. The artist Paul Fierlinger found a home at Thirteen when no other television station or production entity would touch his work. "They gave me total freedom," Fierlinger said about the Thirteen producers he worked with to create his critically acclaimed film Drawn From Memory, the first animated autobiography ever made for an adult audience. "They had the courage to try something that hadn't been done before." Thirteen redoubled its commitment to artists like Fierlinger last year with the THIRTEEN NEW YORK ARTS FESTIVAL, an important new initiative designed to showcase creativity in all its variety, from the performing arts to the visual arts. This year, the THIRTEEN NEW YORK ARTS FESTIVAL is back, airing throughout April. The festival offers over 80 programs, totaling well over 100 hours, that look at the creative process and its glorious, often surprising results. Festival presentations include programs exploring the fine arts, photography, music, dance, literature, architecture, film, and theater. The centerpiece of the festival, SETTING THE STAGE, is an original, 90-minute, local production hosted by award-winning actress Lynn Redgrave. It premieres Thursday, April 12 at 9 p.m. SETTING THE STAGE features profiles of artists and arts organizations in New York City, and interviews conducted by Thirteen's chief executive officer, Dr. William F. Baker, with area arts leaders. The people who appear in the program provide a unique, insider's perspective and offer personal insights that reveal much about the current state of the arts in our eclectic and energetic city. They include jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, poet/activist La Bruja, architect David Rockwell, Tina Ramirez of Ballet Hispanico, Julián Zugazagoitia of El Museo del Barrio, Peter Gelb of the Metropolitan Opera, Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, and Karen Brooks Hopkins of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The "stages" featured in the program take viewers from the Langston Hughes House arts center in Harlem to Jazz at Lincoln Center's new location at Columbus Circle. The interviews and profiles continue throughout April as Thirteen's popular local newsmagazine NEW YORK VOICES gets into the act, devoting its weekly Friday, 10 p.m. timeslot to artists working in many different genres. First up is actress Christine Ebersole, star of the Broadway musical Grey Gardens, who is interviewed by host Rafael Pi Roman on Friday, April 6 at 10 p.m. The THIRTEEN NEW YORK ARTS FESTIVAL offers something for everyone and every taste, whether they lean toward the experimental or the traditional, with a wide variety of premiere programs. One highlight is INDEPENDENT LENS: Stolen, Tuesday, April 3 at 10:30 p.m., a film by Rebecca Dreyfus about the 1990 theft of 13 priceless works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Another festival premiere, also from INDEPENDENT LENS, is Revolución: Five Visions, on Tuesday, April 10 at 10 p.m., a film by Nicole Cattell that looks at the Cuban Revolution through the personal stories of five photographers on both sides of the political divide. The visual arts - specifically, the ability of art to empower and heal - are revealed again on Friday, April 13 at 9 p.m., in CHANGING IDENTITIES: A STORY OF TRAUMATIC INJURY AND ART. This uplifting documentary follows four people suffering from traumatic injury as they participate in a unique method of recovery pioneered by artist Bill Richards. Later in the month, THE IMPRESSIONISTS, Sunday, April 22 at 9 p.m., considers the work of Claude Monet and his contemporaries from the perspective of their era. In this insightful drama, Julian Glover stars as Monet, who recalls a time when he and Cezanne, Manet, Renoir, Degas, and Pisarro were shunned by the art world for their unorthodox techniques. The THIRTEEN NEW YORK ARTS FESTIVAL is a feast for the ears, as well as the eyes, with performance programs that run the gamut, from opera to rock. On Wednesday, April 4 at 8 p.m., IN PERFORMANCE AT THE WHITE HOUSE presents Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, starring Anita Baker, Bobby Watson and other artists. Thirteen's GREAT PERFORMANCES puts the spotlight on movement and music with two favorite encores, Dance in America: Beyond the Steps: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Thursday, April 12 at 8 p.m., and Bruce Springsteen: The Seeger Sessions Live, Thursday, April 19 at 8 p.m. And from Thirteen's new venture with the Metropolitan Opera, GREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET, comes Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, premiering Thursday, April 26 at 9 p.m. and starring American soprano Renée Fleming and Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Another festival highlight comes from Thirteen's AMERICAN MASTERS series. NOVEL REFLECTIONS on THE AMERICAN DREAM premieres Wednesday, April 4 at 9 p.m. and explores seven groundbreaking 20th-century novels that reveal the inequities of the American Dream. Excerpts from the novels are dramatized with original and archival re-creations, and read by actors Juliana Margulies (The House of Mirth), Tom Hammond (The Great Gatsby) and Keith Carradine (The Grapes of Wrath), among others. The final week of the festival reaffirms Thirteen's place on the television landscape as a laboratory of sorts for the new and untried. In MY SHAKESPEARE: ROMEO AND JULIET WITH BAZ LUHRMANN, Monday, April 23 at 10 p.m., the tragic love story is daringly reinvented when Luhrmann, who directed a blockbuster Hollywood version starring Leonardo DiCaprio in 1996, culls his amateur but inspired cast from a poor London neighborhood. Then, on Sunday, April 29 at 10 p.m., it's ANGELS IN AMERICA - THE OPERA, an adaptation by Peter Eötvös of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Major funding for SETTING THE STAGE and the THIRTEEN NEW YORK ARTS FESTIVAL has been provided by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.