Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts putting a premium on collaboration

With its vast array of 145 events, the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts has one admission requirement for nearly everyone on and off stage: faith that highly touted collaborations - many of which are unprecedented, some of which weren't likely to happen under any other circumstances - will live up to the festival's exterior glitz.

Even those intimately involved with some of these high-profile joint efforts of the festival, which begins Thursday night and runs through May 1, can't predict what will happen, if only because the individual pieces often will be assembled quickly before the first performance.

"With my schedule and their schedule . . . I have no idea what they've arrived at," admitted Philadelphia Orchestra associate conductor Rossen Milanov, who is collaborating with the Pennsylvania Ballet on a staging of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, Thursday's opening-night event. "But I'm sure it'll be fine."

Optimism? The educated guess of a seasoned ballet conductor? Whatever the case, that unpredictability is the festival's primary departure from everyday cultural life in Philadelphia. With its theme of Paris 1910-20, PIFA has a certain amount of populist novelty - the 81-foot Eiffel Tower erected inside the Kimmel Center, the all-day fair April 30 on Broad Street between Chestnut and Lombard - that is likely to attract citywide attention. Most festivals of this size have a mandate to serve the larger community, and this one is no exception.

More significantly, the festival is a conscious coming together of Philadelphia arts institutions - the idea behind the 2009 $10 million grant from the late philanthropist Leonore Annenberg - that inevitably means artists may be leaving their comfort zones to find common ground, and in a way that seldom happens during their regular seasons.

For some, it's an opportunity to take chances without the usual responsibility to subscribers; others feel more like they're jumping off a cliff.

Barbara Silverstein, PIFA's artistic producer, is reassuring: "No matter how complicated the situation is, you have a goal. The curtain goes up and whatever stage you're in, you're ready to perform." And she knows, having lived with that kind of uncertainty as founder of the Pennsylvania Opera Theater, whose 18-year run ended in 1993.