Grammy Award-winning bluegrass performer Béla Fleck canceled an upcoming performance at the Kennedy Center, saying the venue has become too politically charged after a series of recent changes at the storied venue championed by President Donald Trump.
“Performing there has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music,” Fleck posted to Instagram Tuesday evening. “I look forward to playing with the NSO [National Symphony Orchestra] another time in the future when we can together share and celebrate art.”
Fleck, a member of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame with 17 Grammy wins to his name, was scheduled to perform alongside the NSO in mid-February but is now one of nearly a dozen of this year’s performers who have canceled their shows.
NOTUS’ Torrence Banks first reported the wave of cancellations on Dec. 19, just one day after the storied arts center’s board of trustees voted to rename the venue the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” Trump fired and replaced many of the board’s members in the first months of his presidency, appointing allies to the board and himself as its chairman.
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In a video message posted to X following the vote, ex-officio member Rep. Joyce Beatty said it was not a unanimous decision, claiming microphones were muted when she attempted to oppose the measure.
In the weeks since, the number of cancellations has grown and currently stands at nearly a dozen.
“It’s no longer a focus on the arts, and it’s very sad. And I know a lot of the people that I perform with are very sad,” a performer told NOTUS last month on the condition of anonymity.
“Kennedy Center is supposed to be a memorial, focusing on being nonpartisan,” the performer continued. “A place where people, it doesn’t matter what party they believe in, should be performing and experiencing the arts together regardless of what their party is. And it has not become that.”
Choreographer and dancer Doug Varone explained to PBS News that his decision to cancel was not easy to make.
“Renaming it Donald Trump Center, it seems to go completely against every principle and every mission that the center stands for,” Varone told PBS. “I couldn’t put myself or my dancers into that building right now.”
The composer of the musical “Wicked,” Stephen Schwartz, said in his decision to cancel over the weekend that appearing at the Kennedy Center under Trump’s leadership “has now become an ideological statement … As long as that remains the case, I will not appear there.”
Since Trump stocked the Kennedy Center board with allies shortly after taking office, tickets to the decades-old performance center have dropped by nearly 50%. Tens of thousands of seats have been left empty across the hall’s three major theaters, The Washington Post reported.
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