Post-Trump purge, can the Kennedy Center save itself? How Mark Morris showed the way
Washington, D.C. — Like much else in the nation's capital, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is in a state of uncertainty. For 53 years, this massive performance complex has served — with bipartisan grace and, at its best, conspicuous American flair — to honor a single U.S. president. But in February the center was appropriated by another president who now also rules as chairman of a board of trustees, all of whom are his appointees.
The takeover resulted in the firing of the center's long-serving president, Deborah Rutter, one of the country's most impressive arts leaders. Over the last decade, she expanded an already vast institution's offerings. The center's new temporary president, Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, lacks arts management experience.
In the meantime, the new administrators warn that the Kennedy Center is impoverished, that the facility has become shoddy and that some of its programming ill serves the American ideal. Diversity and drag are out, which has led to the disinviting of, among others, the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, D.C., from performing on the premises. Celebrating Christmas, promises Grenell, is very much in, as will be striving for profit-making programming. One suggestion is commercializing the center to take advantage of its real estate value and prime location on the Potomac.
On a recent afternoon I wandered the Kennedy Center's grand hallways leading to an opera house (home of Washington National Opera), concert hall (home to the National Symphony) and the Eisenhower Theater (suited for drama and dance), all overseen by a super-sized bust of JFK. I visited the galleries and shops and restaurants, the Millennium Stage (where a free chamber music performance was taking place) and checked out a recent addition, the Reach, a $250-million complex of flexible venues, an investment the new administration bemoans.
It was a beautiful spring day, and the Kennedy Center appeared to be well-tended but unusually quiet. Other than a small crowd listening to members of the National Symphony perform chamber music, I felt like I had the building practically to myself. A clerk in one of the gift shops was thrilled to finally have a customer. I was the only one in the galleries. Exhibits still reflected diversity. Rainbow flag Kennedy Center T-shirts remained for sale.
There have been cancellations in protest of the takeover — notably Rhiannon Giddens, the Broadway production of 'Hamilton' and what was to have been the Washington premiere of Gregory Spears' moving opera 'Fellow Travelers,' based on the Lavender Scare, the 1950s federal persecution of gay men and lesbians in government. But Mark Morris' potentially controversial new ballet, 'Moon,' was having its world premiere that evening as planned.
Morris may be America's leading choreographer, but he also can be a fanciful bad boy of dance. Tell him he can't do something and, I've been told, look out. It would be hard to imagine the current Kennedy Center welcoming Morris' manner of dispensing Christmas cheer. His brilliant yuletime hit, 'The Hard Nut,' based on Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker,' has been delighting audiences of all ages for three decades, but it does happen to include a comedic maid in drag.
When the Kennedy Center last fall commissioned Morris to make an evening-length centerpiece for its vast 'Earth to Space: Arts Breaking the Sky' festival, nothing more was intended than to honor JFK's initiative that led, in 1969, to Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin being the first Earthlings to walk on the moon. The festival is an exuberant example of the sweeping events that Rutter created. It includes concerts, opera, dance, film, talks, installations, exhibits, interstellar musical journeys of one oddball sort or another, appearances by astronauts and space-specialist celebrities, not to mention daily screenings of a new film, 'The Moonwalkers,' featuring Tom Hanks.
All of this takes on new meaning, especially if we recall JFK's 1962 speech at Rice University in Houston. In it he defended the enormity of the Apollo 11 mission's expense by noting, 'There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet,' and warned that 'its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.'
NASA is preparing for a moon landing again in 2027. The temptation, this time, goes beyond scientific curiosity to colonization, mining rare elements and using the moon as a waystation to Mars. The two most zealous space buffs on Earth loom large in Washington, with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a moon race with their respective rocket enterprises, Blue Origin and Space X.
Enter Mark Morris. He had been cagey all along about what he had in mind, other than to include the moon landing and the Golden Record, the disc that astronomer and media personality Carl Sagan made for Voyager 1 and 2. Launched in 1977, these two NASA spacecraft were the first intended to leave our solar system. The recording includes sounds, voices and music of the Earth's peoples, in hopes that it just might reach intelligent life somewhere out there.
'Moon,' which is a series of short dances that lasts just under an hour, begins with an animated display of five-pointed stars in a semicircle on a screen that served as the backdrop for the Eisenhower stage. The stars slyly become the circumference of the U.S. presidential seal. But rather than leading to outrage, an image of JFK appeared beneath the seal, and then one of the moon. The audience laughed and then warmly applauded.
Morris' silvery moon was a place of mystery and wonder. Musical choices were agreeably eccentric. Beyond the Golden Record's greetings in many languages to aliens, Morris turned to gloriously schmaltzy swing, bluegrass and country recordings from the '30s, '40s and '50s. These included Al Bowlly's 'Roll Along, Prairie Moon,' Bill Monroe's 'Blue Moon of Kentucky,' Bonnie Guitar's 'Dark Moon' and Hildegarde's 'Honey-Coloured Moon.' Pianist and organist Colin Fowler, joined by bassist Jordan Frazier, added their contributions from the pit. A few of György Ligeti's startlingly strange solo piano numbers from 'Musica Ricercata' showed up. Dancers rolled by on wheeled stools like little space people to some of Marcel Dupré's eerie '24 Organ Inventions.'
With gorgeously impressionist lighting (by Mike Faba), intriguing outer space projections (by Wendall K. Harrington), elegant costumes (by Isaac Mizrahi) and little toy spacemen scattered about, the Morris 'Moon' became a luxuriant dreamlike escape from Washingtonian reality. Most important of all, his company had never been better, and the dancers themselves provided the real fantasy. Otherworldly movement somehow matched the different music in ways that seem rational but not needing to make sense. Movement, itself, was adventure, around every turn an imaginative new surprise.
To walk into a newly uncertain Kennedy Center can feel fraught. But in his program note, Morris asks us to 'observe and enjoy Moon and Space, without understanding a thing.' The genius of 'Moon,' however, is to remind us that wonder can be around the least expected corners.
Can 'Moon' remind NASA to go to the moon to wonder, not to plunder? Probably not. But it can remind artists that if 'Moon' matters, so still must a Kennedy Center that nourishes and produces such work.
Following the three Kennedy Center performances, 'Moon' will be visible in the next seasons over parts of America, including Southern California, where Morris has a large following and favored status in many venues. (The head of the Broad Stage in Santa Monica came to D.C. for the premiere.) In the meantime, Morris' 'Pepperland' reaches the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills next month and the Music Center Plaza in downtown L.A. is offering daily two-minute afternoon breathing and Morris-choreographed movement 'microbreaks,' meant to help us 'pause, reflect and recharge.'
Kennedy Center, please, before it is too late, pause, reflect and recharge. America needs you. And you, if you decide to understand a thing or two, will need us.
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