Lincoln Center Festival Adopts a "New to You" Formula The Lincoln Center Festival, which opens Saturday, offers New York's cultural cognoscenti the opportunity to show off their global bona fides. Planning to see Damon Albarn and Chen Shi-Zheng's "Monkey: Journey to the West"? Already caught it in England, at the Manchester Festival in 2007. How about Complicite's "Shun-kin"? Saw the original 2008 production in Tokyo. And the Mongolian folk music of the Chinese band Hanggai? Loved their deep throat singing at Bonnaroo in 2011. Lincoln Center Festival veterans should not be surprised that this summer's headliners have appeared elsewhere. In recent summers, this genre-bending series has been less concerned with introducing world premieres than with presenting foreign ensembles and traveling blockbusters - whether theater, dance, music, all of the above (like this year's "Monkey") or none of the above (like last year's screening of Christian Marclay's 24-hour film "The Clock"). If these are not world firsts, so what? That's the view of Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which essentially created the contemporary international arts festival in New York in 1983 with its Next Wave Festival. "Our audiences want to be served in their backyard, their hometown," he said. All we want is the New York premiere. Many of Lincoln Center's most memorable imports, like "The Peony Pavilion," the 19-hour Chinese opera directed by Mr. Chen in 1999, and Ariane Mnouchkine's six-hour drama, "Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) " in 2005, had their debuts in other places. Still, New York is different. As Nigel Redden, Lincoln Center Festival's director since 1998, said, "Performing here is very special." He quoted a recent comment from a visiting producer: " "We should always be in New York at the end of a tour because it never gets better." " This year's extravaganza, which runs through July 28, has 62 performances by artists and troupes from 10 different countries. That's fewer than last year's 85 performances, but more than the 47 presented in 2010. It is pared down from previous years in other ways, though. There is no dance, no film, no art or video installation and hardly any complementary seminars and lectures. Nor is there a marathon foreign epic that requires survivalist skills. That may disappoint some dance fans who have become accustomed to seeing the Mariinsky Ballet or Merce Cunningham Dance there. Speaking of this omission, Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce Theater, which specializes in dance, said, "I did notice it when I got the brochure." Although she admitted being unable to suppress a self-interested pang of glee - "I thought, "Less competition for us" " - Ms. Shelton pointed out that some festival productions, like "Monkey," do incorporate dance. Ultimately, what characterizes the Lincoln Center Festival is that it cannot be characterized, Mr. Redden said. "We are a very different festival than those that are discipline specific," he said. We don't have a formula, and we have the luxury of being scatter-site, and using a range of theaters every year. The lack of a formula the major attraction, said Mark Russell, the artistic director and producer of the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater. "That's actually why I count on this festival," he said. There's always a surprise. Every festival is a combination of soaring artistic ambition, gritty logistical details and scheduling kismet. Those forces aligned this year for "Monkey" - which Mr. Redden said he had first started talking about in 2006 - but they did not for a dance company. Mr. Redden, who also serves as general director of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., brought "Monkey" there in 2008. So he decided to try something new and schedule 27 performances of "Monkey" to run for the entire length of the festival at the David H. Koch Theater, the usual stage for dance troupes. "It demands a longer run," Mr. Redden said of the large and complicated production, "and it demands word of mouth." As for "Michaels Reise um die Erde" ("Michael's Journey Around the World"), an excerpt from Karlheinz Stockhausen's 29-hour opera cycle "Licht," Mr. Redden said the festival had been on the lookout for a work by this composer but did not have a particular piece in mind. If dance is not on the calendar, other festival favorites are. Simon McBurney's British theater company Complicite is back for its fourth engagement and its second collaboration with Setagaya Public Theater of Japan. The play "Shun-kin," based in the writings of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, is about the relationship between a blind musician and her servant lover in 19th-century Japan and includes puppetry by Blind Summit Theater. Aurélia Thierrée and her mother, the groundbreaking director Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, are returning with "Murmurs," a dreamlike show that includes the American dancer Jaime D. Martinez and the Swedish circus artist Magnus Jakobsson. Sinead O'Connor's two-night appearance grew out of a previous engagement at Lincoln Center. "She came here last year as part of the Curtis Mayfield tribute and was very moved," Mr. Redden said. She decided she wanted to do something different and wanted to do work with gospel music, something one would not particularly associate with her. What remains unchanged is the festival's motivating force: the desire to attract new visitors to its Upper West Side campus. "The first time someone steps over the threshold is the most difficult time," Mr. Redden said. Lincoln Center has always been coy about the cost of the three-week event, and declined to release budget figures. New York's polyglot population means there is a built-in audience for attractions from far-flung places. Still, the unfamiliar offerings and hard-to-pronounce names can be hard to sell out. In 2002, for example, the festival sold 83 percent of its 107,481 tickets while last year it sold more than 88 percent of its 81,013 seats, said Betsy Vorce, a Lincoln Center spokeswoman. This year, 92,599 tickets are available. Competition from international arts events hosted by other institutions in the city or even other programming efforts at Lincoln Center itself are not a concern, Mr. Redden insisted. "In New York, you can create a festival for yourself every weekend," he said. We make a rule of trying not to compete with what else is going on in town. Jedediah Wheeler, the artistic director of the Peak Performances series in Montclair, N.J., praised Mr. Redden's approach. "Good programming is filled with surprises," he said, "and hopefully annoys a few people."