After Donald Trump announced the appointment of a new chair—himself—at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, many artists rushed to cancel their scheduled appearances. As the cancellations rolled in, the remaking of the Kennedy Center as a Trumpist cultural mecca seemed imminent.
But more quietly, most scheduled performers have not canceled. In the first month of Trump’s chairmanship, the Center hosted a children’s play based on the Navajo creation myth; a class on Caribbean-carnival dancing that teaches, “Every Body is a Carnival Body”; a Klezmer band that plays Yiddish labor music; an Afro-Cuban jazz singer who performs in Spanish; a Black jazz singer who performed a song in the South African click language of Xhosa; a Black low-country Gullah band; and an “oratorio on the fight for women’s suffrage,” as one glowing review in The Washington Post called it.
Many of the artists who went through with their appearance agonized over whether to perform. They faced a version of the dilemma that many people in government, business, and civil society have confronted under the first and second Trump presidencies: When does quitting count as resistance, and when is it surrender? Like the cancelers, those who stuck it out feared that the Kennedy Center would be stripped of its character and turned into an organ for Trump. The difference is they came to believe that canceling would only bring that scenario closer to reality.
The immediate future of the Kennedy Center is unclear, but no sweeping changes have been made to its programming. The institution’s Trump-appointed president and interim executive director, Ric Grenell, announced at a conservative political convention that the center would throw a “big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas”—which wouldn’t necessarily be different from last year’s Christmas-carol sing-alongs and performance of Handel’s Messiah. Steve Bannon generated headlines when he told the crowd at the same conference that the Kennedy Center would feature a performance by the J6 Prison Choir, but that idea might have been a figment of his fertile imagination. (Bannon’s speech included an elaborate fantasy in which, while the choir sings, “the elite” is taken “down to the D.C. gulag.”) The prediction seemed to catch the venue’s bookers off guard; the center told the Los Angeles Times that “we do not have any information on this as a Kennedy Center confirmed event.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s directives so far have been vague. The Kennedy Center “got very wokey,” Trump told the organization’s board last month. “I think we’re going to make it hot.” Earlier this week, he reminded the board how much he loves The Phantom of the Opera and wondered aloud if one of the original Cats actors is still alive (Betty Buckley, and she is).
Even so, for some of those who canceled their Kennedy Center appearances, the choice was an easy one. “I wish I could say there was some sort of decision tree, or there was angst over it, or I had moments of doubt. There was none,” the mystery author Louise Penny, who canceled her Kennedy Center book launch, told me. “I simply couldn’t do it and feel good about myself.” Adam Weiner, the front man for the rock band Low Cut Connie, told me, “It’s very clear that the Kennedy Center is the arts wing of the Trump regime, and I think that artists need to make a stand very early—right now.”
The cancelers—at least a dozen as of this writing—seem to believe that the place is doomed, so their decision doesn’t matter much anyway. José Olivares, who performs with the Puerto Rican indie band Balún, told me that the “transition” at the Kennedy Center “is going to happen regardless, whether Balún would have played or not.”
Artists who are choosing to perform tend to approach the matter differently. They’re focused on the tangible effects of their decisions, not on whether their conscience is weighed down by the new chairman’s anti-“wokey”-ness.
Abigale Reisman, the violinist for the Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band, told me that her initial reaction after Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover was “Fuck them all; fuck the whole place.” But after thinking about the situation, seeking out other opinions, and spending an entire rehearsal talking about it instead of rehearsing, she and the rest of the band decided to play their March 5 gig.
They were swayed, in part, by the realization that pulling out might wind up punishing the Kennedy Center staff. One employee’s testimony was especially persuasive: “His message to all of us was ‘Don’t abandon us,’” recalls Nat Seelen, the band’s clarinetist. Another group the performers didn’t want to abandon: the audience. Alicia Waller, the jazz singer who performed the Xhosa song at her Kennedy Center show late last month, is from Oakton, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. “At the end of my performance, these four little girls who look like me when I was little ran up to me with stars in their eyes, and I was like, ‘That’s what this performance is about,’” Waller told me.
Many artists and patrons have a nightmare scenario in mind for the Kennedy Center: that it becomes so neglected as to be irrelevant except as a venue for the few artists who support Trump. That’s not the case yet, but liberal artists canceling their performance makes it more likely, not less. “We don’t want to comply in advance,” Kirsten Lamb, the bassist and singer for Ezekiel’s Wheels, told me.
Many of the performers took advantage of the opportunity to score some points at Trump’s expense. Dwayne Kennedy, the comedian who opened for W. Kamau Bell at his Kennedy Center performance last month, told the audience, “Welcome to the last time two Black guys are going to be at the Kennedy Center.” Ezekiel’s Wheels announced during their performance that their “hearts are with Ukraine” and that history teaches us to fight against government control of the arts, and urged the audience to think about migrants as they listened to a performance by the descendants of migrants.
Statements like these carry their own risks. The Kennedy Center’s new leader is not known for his tolerance of dissent. If he comes to view the institution as a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment, he might take bigger steps to interfere with its programming than he otherwise would. But then, at least the performers will know that it was his decision—not theirs.
