Travelers to London this year will have more to look forward to than gold medals.
The capital is rolling out many arts events around the Olympic Games (July 27-Aug. 12), some long planned, some commissioned as part of a four-year, $148 million cultural program. Big U.K. names such as Shakespeare, David Hockney and Damien Hirst will be the toast of 2012.
On the quirky side, Martin Creed will set athletics aside and have people through England ring a bell -- a bicycle bell, cowbell, church bell or ringtone -- at 8 a.m. July 27. And "Jerusalem" actor Mark Rylance will approach London pedestrians using Shakespearean verse.
"It would be mad for London to have an event as big as the Olympic Games without it having a really strong cultural component," says Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of participant the Barbican Center. "What London is about so much these days is culture."
Topping the Barbican Theatre bill is actress Cate Blanchett, who will play a rejected wife in Botho Strauss's "Big and Small" (April 13-29).
Also at the Barbican, Toni Morrison teams with Malian singer Rokia Traore to imagine a dialogue from beyond the grave between Shakespeare's Desdemona and her African nurse, Barbary (July 19-20.).
In the two days before the Games, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra play Wynton Marsalis's "Swing Symphony," a tribute to jazz legends (July 25-26).
The visual-arts slate for 2012 is particularly rich. This month, sees the opening of a Royal Academy of Arts show of mostly new works by David Hockney (Jan. 21-April 9). The tech-savvy artist will première a giant grid with images from nine cameras of the same scene at slightly different angles.
Lucian Freud, who died last July, is the focus of a portrait show in what would have been the year of his 90th birthday (at the National Portrait Gallery, Feb. 9-May 27).
Hirst gets his first-ever British retrospective with some 70 works at Tate Modern
(April 4-Sept. 9). They include his shark in formaldehyde ("The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living") and his $76.64 million diamond skull.
"We were keen to show British artists" during the Olympic year, Tate director Nicholas Serota sai. "It seemed simply, to us, to be the right moment."
The Serpentine Gallery is exhibiting an artist who, though not British, played a role in British cultural history: Yoko Ono (June 19-Sept. 9). Ono will show film and performance work and create an installation called 'Smile' that will invite all to upload a smiling photograph of themselves or have one taken in a booth outside the gallery.
A World Shakespeare Festival will be the most extensive of its kind. More than 50 organizations worldwide will give their interpretation of the plays.
Dance lovers will get a monthlong season of Pina Bausch: 10 works performed back to back by her Tanztheater Wuppertal that were created for the Olympics and inspired by the cities she traveled to
(June 6-July 9). In "Metamorphosis," seven choreographers will produce works inspired by Titian for the Royal Ballet.
Classical-music aficionados will be in Scotland for an outdoor concert: On June 21, Gustavo Dudamel and his 200-strong Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela will play Stirling Castle and will be joined by a group of young Scottish players.
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