#kennedy-center

#kennedy-center

On a blustery evening in October, Daniel Foster sat onstage at the Kennedy Center, viola in his lap. The National Symphony Orchestra was about to play "Don Juan," an 1889 tone poem by Richard Strauss about a young libertine in search of the ideal woman. The opening is fiendishly tricky for viola. It has a fast and technical harmonic line that's musically demanding and strange. Thirty years ago, in his audition to be the NSO's principal violist, Foster played that excerpt. He won the job.

When the sculptor Joel Shapiro created Blue, the piece that stands around the back of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, looking out over the Potomac River in Washington, he wanted to tap into a number of elements. The giant matchstick figure denotes movement and energy, risk and possibility. As Shapiro himself has said, it is supposed to reconfigure depending on how you look at it.

WASHINGTON, DC - On Saturday, November 22, protestors expanded and crunched their bodies, arms rising and falling with flicked wrists, as they marched in front of the Kennedy Center with stoic expressions. Passersby would be excused for mistaking it for an official performance, but the show outside the nation's art center was actually a " dance protest " organized in response to President Trump's rising authoritarianism.

Leaving the Kennedy Center is a possible scenario after a collapse in box office revenue and shattered donor confidence in the wake of Trump's takeover, said Zambello. It is our desire to perform in our home at the Kennedy Center, she said. But if we cannot raise enough money, or sell enough tickets in there, we have to consider other options. The two things that support a company financially, because of the takeover, have been severely compromised, she said.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has fired another staffer: Kevin Struthers, a senior director of music programming who had been at the D.C. arts institution for 30 years. Struthers confirmed his termination to NPR on Thursday. His dismissal is the latest upset in a line of firings and resignations at the Kennedy Center since President Trump became its chair in February and appointed Richard Grennell its new president.

"David's just next level. It doesn't sound like a live record until you hear the clapping - that's how you know you got it right."

Moran accepted the position at the Kennedy Center in 2011, a year after his predecessor, Dr. Billy Taylor, died, and hosted numerous performances and education programs.

"The performance reminds us that our fight for equality and for democracy isn't over. It's happening right now." - Sen. Hickenlooper

We were front and center, and it was delightful. Hopefully the cast got to see us... We were very, very excited to be at the Kennedy Center.

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Theater is supposed to be a place of community, a place of storytelling, a place of celebration, joy, catharsis and it should be open and available to all.