Washington, D.C. — Like a lot else within the nation’s capital, the John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts is in a state of uncertainty. For 53 years, this huge efficiency complicated has served — with bipartisan grace and, at its finest, conspicuous American aptitude — to honor a single U.S. president. However in February the middle was appropriated by one other president who now additionally guidelines as chairman of a board of trustees, all of whom are his appointees.
The takeover resulted within the firing of the middle’s long-serving president, Deborah Rutter, one of many nation’s most spectacular arts leaders. During the last decade, she expanded an already huge establishment’s choices. The middle’s new non permanent president, Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, lacks arts administration expertise.
Within the meantime, the brand new directors warn that the Kennedy Heart is impoverished, that the power has develop into shoddy and that a few of its programming ailing serves the American supreme. Variety and drag are out, which has led to the disinviting of, amongst others, the Homosexual Males’s Refrain of Washington, D.C., from acting on the premises. Celebrating Christmas, guarantees Grenell, may be very a lot in, as can be striving for profit-making programming. One suggestion is commercializing the middle to benefit from its actual property worth and prime location on the Potomac.
On a latest afternoon I wandered the Kennedy Heart’s grand hallways resulting in an opera home (residence of Washington Nationwide Opera), live performance corridor (residence to the Nationwide Symphony) and the Eisenhower Theater (fitted to drama and dance), all overseen by a super-sized bust of JFK. I visited the galleries and outlets and eating places, the Millennium Stage (the place a free chamber music efficiency was happening) and checked out a latest addition, the Attain, a $250-million complicated of versatile venues, an funding the brand new administration bemoans.
It was a fantastic spring day, and the Kennedy Heart gave the impression to be well-tended however unusually quiet. Aside from a small crowd listening to members of the Nationwide Symphony carry out chamber music, I felt like I had the constructing virtually to myself. A clerk in one of many reward outlets was thrilled to lastly have a buyer. I used to be the one one within the galleries. Displays nonetheless mirrored range. Rainbow flag Kennedy Heart T-shirts remained on the market.
There have been cancellations in protest of the takeover — notably Rhiannon Giddens, the Broadway manufacturing of “Hamilton” and what was to have been the Washington premiere of Gregory Spears’ shifting opera “Fellow Travelers,” based mostly on the Lavender Scare, the Nineteen Fifties federal persecution of homosexual males and lesbians in authorities. However Mark Morris’ probably controversial new ballet, “Moon,” was having its world premiere that night as deliberate.
Morris could also be America’s main choreographer, however he additionally could be a fanciful unhealthy boy of dance. Inform him he can’t do one thing and, I’ve been informed, look out. It could be laborious to think about the present Kennedy Heart welcoming Morris’ method of dishing out Christmas cheer. His sensible yuletime hit, “The Hard Nut,” based mostly on Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” has been delighting audiences of all ages for 3 many years, but it surely does occur to incorporate a comedic maid in drag.
When the Kennedy Heart final fall commissioned Morris to make an evening-length centerpiece for its huge “Earth to Space: Arts Breaking the Sky” pageant, nothing extra was meant than to honor JFK’s initiative that led, in 1969, to Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin being the primary Earthlings to stroll on the moon. The pageant is an exuberant instance of the sweeping occasions that Rutter created. It contains concert events, opera, dance, movie, talks, installations, displays, interstellar musical journeys of 1 oddball kind or one other, appearances by astronauts and space-specialist celebrities, to not point out day by day screenings of a brand new movie, “The Moonwalkers,” that includes Tom Hanks.
All of this takes on new that means, particularly if we recall JFK’s 1962 speech at Rice College 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 getting ready for a moon touchdown once more in 2027. The temptation, this time, goes past scientific curiosity to colonization, mining uncommon components and utilizing the moon as a waystation to Mars. The 2 most zealous house buffs on Earth loom massive in Washington, with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a moon race with their respective rocket enterprises, Blue Origin and House X.
Enter Mark Morris. He had been cagey all alongside about what he had in thoughts, aside from to incorporate the moon touchdown and the Golden File, the disc that astronomer and media persona Carl Sagan made for Voyager 1 and a couple of. Launched in 1977, these two NASA spacecraft had been the primary meant to depart our photo voltaic system. The recording contains sounds, voices and music of the Earth’s peoples, in hopes that it simply may attain clever life someplace on the market.
Members of the Mark Morris Dance Group carry out the world premiere of “Moon” on April 4, 2025, on the Kennedy Heart Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C.
(ximena brunette / xmbphotography)
“Moon,” which is a sequence of quick dances that lasts slightly below an hour, begins with an animated show of five-pointed stars in a semicircle on a display screen that served because the backdrop for the Eisenhower stage. The celebs slyly develop into the circumference of the U.S. presidential seal. However quite than resulting in outrage, a picture of JFK appeared beneath the seal, after which one of many moon. The viewers laughed after which warmly applauded.
Morris’ silvery moon was a spot of thriller and marvel. Musical decisions had been agreeably eccentric. Past the Golden File’s greetings in lots of languages to aliens, Morris turned to gloriously schmaltzy swing, bluegrass and nation recordings from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. These included Al Bowlly’s “Roll Along, Prairie Moon,” Invoice 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 couple of of György Ligeti’s startlingly unusual solo piano numbers from “Musica Ricercata” confirmed up. Dancers rolled by on wheeled stools like little house individuals to a few of Marcel Dupré’s eerie “24 Organ Inventions.”
With gorgeously impressionist lighting (by Mike Faba), intriguing outer house projections (by Wendall Okay. Harrington), elegant costumes (by Isaac Mizrahi) and little toy spacemen scattered about, the Morris “Moon” grew to become a luxuriant dreamlike escape from Washingtonian actuality. Most vital of all, his firm had by no means been higher, and the dancers themselves offered the true fantasy. Otherworldly motion in some way matched the completely different music in ways in which appear rational however not needing to make sense. Motion, itself, was journey, round each flip an imaginative new shock.
To stroll right into a newly unsure Kennedy Heart can really feel fraught. However in his program observe, Morris asks us to “observe and enjoy Moon and Space, without understanding a thing.” The genius of “Moon,” nevertheless, is to remind us that marvel could be across the least anticipated corners.
Can “Moon” remind NASA to go to the moon to marvel, to not plunder? Most likely not. However it may remind artists that if “Moon” issues, so nonetheless should a Kennedy Heart that nourishes and produces such work.
Kennedy Heart, please, earlier than it’s too late, pause, replicate and recharge. America wants you. And also you, when you determine to grasp a factor or two, will want us.
