San Francisco Ballet pulls out of Kennedy Center performances
The San Francisco Ballet has withdrawn from a series of performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the company said Saturday, in the latest cancellation during the Trump administration’s takeover of the institution.
In a statement, the ballet company said its board of trustees had decided to call off the five-day run of performances that was scheduled for late May.
“SF Ballet looks forward to performing for Washington, D.C., audiences in the future,” the statement said.
In a statement responding to the ballet company’s decision, Richard Grenell, whom President Donald Trump appointed as the Kennedy Center’s president last year, said, “Professional artists should perform for everyone — not just for people they agree with politically.”
For weeks, the ballet company has been under pressure from some patrons to cancel its performances as Trump has ramped up his efforts to remake the institution. The center’s Trump-allied board voted to add the president’s name to the center in December, a decision that prompted an uproar from Democrats and has been challenged in court. Trump, who installed himself as chair of the center more than a year ago, announced this month that he would shut it down this summer for a two-year renovation project.
The Kennedy Center has seen a wave of cancellations since Trump’s name was added to the building’s marble facade, including by composer Philip Glass and soprano Renée Fleming. The past year has been one of sustained upheaval at the institution, as ticket sales have fallen and dozens of employees have resigned or been fired.
The decision by the San Francisco Ballet, one of the most prestigious ballet companies in the country, is the most prominent cancellation from the dance world so far. Starting on May 27, the company had seven performances scheduled of a contemporary ballet called “Mere Mortals,” which was inspired by artificial intelligence and Greek myth. The news of the cancellation was earlier reported by The Bold Italic, an online publication.
A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center, Roma Daravi, said Saturday that “artists are pressured by cancel culture for daring to perform for everyone.”
Major modern and contemporary dance companies, including Martha Graham Dance Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, have opted not to perform at the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center. The company’s peers in the ballet world have generally decided to forge ahead. American Ballet Theater performed there this month. New York City Ballet is scheduled to perform there in June.
Grenell has sharply criticized artists who have canceled shows at the center, saying late last year that they had been booked by “the previous far left leadership” of the institution. “Boycotting the Arts to show you support the Arts is a form of derangement syndrome,” he wrote on social media.
Last year, the center fired its director of dance programming and hired Stephen Nakagawa, a former dancer with the Washington Ballet who had written a letter to Grenell in which he noted his support for the Trump administration and complained about “radical leftist ideologies in ballet.”
The leadership of the San Francisco Ballet had been mulling how to respond in recent weeks as an online petition calling on the company to cancel gathered signatures and attracted news coverage. Other performing arts companies have also been agonizing over a decision to cancel, weighing the positions of patrons and board members, as well as potential financial consequences.
In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle that was published this past week, Isaac Hernández, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater, said that there had been many conversations about plans to perform at the center, but that the troupe ultimately decided that “we are all bound by a professional duty to our company and to our art form.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.