WASHINGTON — Heather Dune Macadam still remembers one thought that bubbled inside her as she stepped onto the stage decades ago at the Kennedy Center for a dance competition: “Wow, I made it.”
Then, just last month, when she heard about President Donald Trump’s appointment as chairman of the Kennedy Center and the replacement of its board, she thought back to a parallel experience she had during the Reagan administration.
It was May 1981 when the then-21-year-old dancer had her first professional dance gig at the Kennedy Center. That same night, the Reagan administration cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, as she recalled. The day after their competition, without the pay they had expected to receive, the Wayne State dance team put their pennies together to buy enough gas to get back to Detroit.
Macadam said the funding cut wasn’t only a hit to their pocketbooks and felt like a betrayal of hope and the arts. In the years since, Macadam became a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and later a Holocaust biographer and documentary filmmaker of “999: The Forgotten Girls.”
Now Macadam, like many other performing artists and creative people, viewed President Donald Trump’s appointment as chairman of the Kennedy Center and the replacement of its board with trepidation about the consequences for artistic freedom.
“I fear for my country,” Macadam said. “I fear for my country's moral and ethical conscience, which I think the arts hold us accountable to. And without that moral compass, where will we go?”
One entrance hall of the Kennedy Center displays flags from all 50 states and Washington D.C. Valerie Chu/MNS
The recent upheaval at the Kennedy Center started with a Feb. 7 Truth Social post from Trump, in which he announced the immediate termination of multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees who “do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” To some artists, it marked a startlingly authoritarian approach to the arts that started when he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities hours after his second inauguration.
The Kennedy Center was established under the Eisenhower administration by the National Cultural Center Act in 1958 and later renamed in another law to serve as a “living memorial” to President John F. Kennedy.
A Kennedy Center statement captured by archive on Feb. 8 but no longer available said the center was “aware of the post made recently by POTUS (Trump) on social media” but had received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to their board of trustees.
“There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board,” the statement said.
In less than a week, multiple Biden appointees were purged from the Kennedy Center. The new board then elected Trump as its chairman. No previous president had ever assumed that role.
Changes to the Kennedy Center’s programming have already started. On March 6, “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and lead producer Jeffrey Seller told the New York Times that the musical about the birth of American democracy would not be performed next year at the Kennedy Center.
“The recent purge by the Trump Administration of both professional staff and performing arts events at or originally produced by the Kennedy Center flies in the face of everything this national cultural center represents,” Seller wrote in the statement. “Given these recent actions, our show simply cannot, in good conscience, participate and be a part of this new culture that is being imposed on the Kennedy Center.”
On Feb. 18, the Kennedy Center canceled a pride concert planned for May 21 that would have featured the Gay Men’s Choir. And on Feb. 14, actress, comedian, and television producer Issa Rae canceled her sold-out show, “An Evening With Issa Rae.”
Marshall Coid, a musician who has performed at the Kennedy Center multiple times, said that the Kennedy Center should not be turned into a sanitized place that caters to “undeveloped and narrow-minded tastes.” He raised concerns that the new board would villainize art forms such as drag performances, whose elements and history extend far beyond what most people initially picture drag to be.
“The Kennedy Center, to me, represents the nation,” Coid said. “And that’s everyone’s art. There’s room for it all.”
Coid studied violin at Juilliard and has performed as a countertenor and violinist at the Kennedy Center, including as a soloist in Tom O’Horgan staging of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” for the Center’s 10th Anniversary Celebration. He has also performed as an onstage violin soloist with Jinkx Monsoon while she played Matron “Mama” Morton in CHICAGO on Broadway, and he acted in several roles himself that included cross-dressing.
Coid said he was worried the Kennedy Center’s new leadership would interfere with programming, including banning drag. In Trump’s Truth Social post, he said: “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.”
Coid described the Trump administration's move to control the Kennedy Center as something that left him and other performers he knows “heartsick, appalled and horrified.”
“We may not have so consciously been carrying around a sense of what it meant to us, but when it's taken away, we realize,” Coid said. “I think we took it for granted and never thought that it was vulnerable. And now it has been clearly demonstrated to be vulnerable, and as far as I'm concerned, under attack and being grotesquely diminished by this intrusion, by people that have no business having anything to do with it and should be nowhere near it.”
Singer, songwriter, and performer Gwen Levey said stories would go untold, and government censorship of the arts would likely increase. She predicted that social justice, which the Kennedy Center showcased previously, would no longer be promoted, and the variety of music would be reduced. She pointed to the diverse board of people appointed by previous presidents who resigned in the wake of Trump’s takeover, such as “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes, soprano Reneé Fleming, and singer-songwriter Ben Folds.
“The diversity is basically being sucked out of the Kennedy Center,” Levey said. “And I wouldn't be surprised if, like most things with this administration, it becomes very whitewashed.”
Neither the Kennedy Center nor the White House responded to multiple requests for comment.
Still, despite its uncertain future, in the weeks after Trump named himself chairman, music continued to fill the Kennedy Center’s halls like normal.
At a concert featuring Cody Fry, LANY, and Sleeping At Last, the artists made jokes, the audience whooped and clapped, and some even sang together during one song.
“Sometimes, I look out into the world, and it feels like optimism is like this radical act of bravery,” singer-songwriter Cody Fry said when introducing his last song. “And I want to focus my mind on the things that are good because I truly believe that the good outnumbers the bad.”
Valerie Chu is a Northwestern University student majoring in journalism, data science, and international studies.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people