Ric Grenell Fires Dance Program Staff From Kennedy Center, Replaces Them With Box Of MAGA Hats
Get ready for Ashli Babbitt: The Ballet.
What’s new in the ongoing decline of the Kennedy Center, which as recently as January 19 was America's premier arts venue before it was taken over by Donald Trump and one of his most obsequious lickspittles, Ric Grenell?
This past week has been all about dance programming. As in, Grenell fired the entire staff of the dance department, including the competent and experienced administrator running it. She was replaced by a guy who describes himself as a “MAGA former dancer” and got the job because he sent Grenell a letter decrying all the wokism and “radical leftist ideologies” in ballet. Presumably the next Kennedy Center production of The Nutcracker will feature Fritz angrily throwing the nutcracker doll into the fireplace and demanding his parents buy him a gun for Christmas.
The new head, Stephen Nakagawa, has a pretty thin resume by the standards of what you might want in the head of a programming group at the Kennedy Center. As NPR noted, he has no experience as a curator or arts administrator, and his qualifications seem to consist of being a member of the Washington Ballet company for a few years. NPR, in its characteristically understated way, called it “unusual for someone without that kind of experience to ascend to a management position at such a high-profile organization.” By which they meant lack of experience.
Meanwhile, the woman Nakagawa replaced, Jane Raleigh, was a veteran arts administrator who had worked at the Center for over a decade. But she had been supportive of the Kennedy Center staff’s unionization drive, so obviously she had to go.
But that’s the story of the Trump administration: replace experienced people with anyone who can hoot MAGA! and woke! and radical Marxism! over and over again like a bonobo with a TBI.
This change in leadership is happening as ticket sales for dance performances at the Kennedy Center absolutely crater, with subscription revenue down by 50 percent for the upcoming season. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a company that has been performing at the Kennedy for years, backed out of performing this season and will be putting on its annual DC show at a different theater. (Which looks like a very nice theater but is not the Kennedy Center.)
Other ballet companies are booked to perform in the Center’s various dance spaces, but, well:
Ticket sales are so poor, the Stuttgart Ballet will be performing for an Opera House between 4 and 19 percent full when the German company comes to Washington early next month. BodyTraffic, the Los Angeles troupe booked for the smaller Eisenhower Theatre October 29 and 30, is at 12 percent capacity.
If you are the director of the Kennedy Center, such numbers might concern you. Perhaps you start to wonder why Washington audiences that appreciate ballet are staying far away from it. Grenell pondered the question, and he came up with the answer. Bet you’ll never guess what it is!
Grenell blamed elitist programming for poor ticket sales, not a widespread boycott of the Kennedy Center by local dance enthusiasts. He told Miller and Burnett that the center should instead be booking acts like performers from So You Think You Can Dance.
Yeah, that’s the problem. All those ballet fans who have been attending dance performances at the Kennedy Center for decades suddenly up and decided it was too elitist an activity. Bring in a live show of “So You Think You Can Dance,” that will surely have them rushing back. Hey, maybe NBC will film the next season of “America’s Got Talent” there, that should really bring in the crowds.
Goddamn right we’re cultural snobs about this. The arts in this country were already underfunded before the Trump administration tied most federal grants and support into a sack with a few cinderblocks and dropped them into the Potomac. But millions of Americans enjoy ballet and deserve the opportunity to watch it without the likes of Grenell sneering about Beltway elitism and threatening to turn their spaces over to a reality TV show.
Grenell is also pushing the Center to collaborate with the Museum of the Bible and the Christian Broadcasting Network. On what, God only knows. Maybe a ballet about dinosaurs not being real or a modern dance interpretation of the life of Pat Robertson.
At least they have not yet renamed the Kennedy’s Opera House after Melania Trump or erected a huge statue of Donald Trump on the grounds. Our souls are not prepared.
In other Washington DC entertainment news, The Wall Street Journal reports that the UFC cage match on the South Lawn of the White House next summer — God, we cannot believe we just typed those words — is a go:
Coming next year to the White House’s South Lawn: a mixed martial arts throwdown to be watched by thousands of spectators. Lasers and fireworks will light up the sky, with the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Octagon cage flanked by the White House and Washington Monument, as combatants punch, kick and grapple each other. Many more people could watch on jumbo screens set up on the Ellipse, a park south of the White House, or other areas nearby.
About the only good news is that there are too many other activities planned for the event’s original date of July 4, so organizers are moving it to June.
It’s not that we think Ultimate Fighting is gauche, or that we’re such huge snobs that we’re sniffing imperiously at the hoi polloi who love it and will turn out next June. (We make dick jokes for a living, for god’s sake.) But the White House is the seat of government and arguably the most famous building in the world, not a dirt-floored Monster Truck arena in Buttcock, Arkansas. We think it should be treated with a certain dignity incongruous with the image of two dudes in a steel cage whaling on each other in their underwear while a huge audience hoots while smashing Budweiser cans against their foreheads.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump is living there right now, and dignity is very much not his thing.
[Washingtonian / NPR / WSJ]
Wonkette is reader-supported, kid-tested, and mother-approved.
Hold me closer
MAGA dancer…
Primadonna Sarah Palin and Prima Ballerina Tom Delay in “Hardly Strictly Ballroom,” featuring Kid Rock, with Special Guest, Vanilla Ice.