The Martha Graham Dance Company has cancelled its performance at the Kennedy Center.
The troupe, America’s oldest, was set to perform at the venue in April as part of its centennial nationwide tour.
“The Martha Graham Dance Company regrets that we are unable to perform at the Kennedy Center in April,” it said in a statement on Friday. “We hope to perform at the center in the future.”
The company did not offer a reason for the cancellation, but it joins a growing list of performers who have cancelled their Kennedy Center dates after Donald Trump added his name to the building.
On Dec. 19, Trump bypassed Congress and had a construction team add his name to the Kennedy Center. Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center board approved the decision, though an official name change of the building requires an act of Congress.
Critics have pointed out that the building’s new title, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” implies that the building is a memorial to the still-living 79-year-old president.
Since the controversial and unofficial name change, acts including Grammy-winning bluegrass performer Béla Fleck, Mexican-born songwriter Sonia De Los Santos, and the Washington National Opera have cancelled performances at the Kennedy Center.
The Martha Graham Dance Company, which has been in operation since 1926, has ties to the Trump family. First Lady Melania Trump was named an honorary chairwoman of the troupe in 2005.
The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, the Kennedy Center has been on a mission to root out “wokeness” from its dance line-up.
In August, it appointed dancer Stephen Nakagawa as its new director of dance and programming. Nakagawa got the job after writing a letter to Richard Grennell, the Kennedy Center’s president, in which he expressed concern about “woke culture” in troupes such as the Washington Ballet. He also expressed a desire to “end the dominance of leftist ideologies in the arts and return to classical ballet’s purity and timeless beauty.”
The Kennedy Center has historically hosted major touring troupes such as the American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet. It has also staged modern productions developed by contemporary ballet choreographers, such as Jamison Curcio and Shanice Mason. The Center hosted the pair’s I have a secret to tell you…, which the Kennedy Center’s website describes as “an invitation to discover, reframe, and practice being in community with Black women and femmes,” on August 22.
Grennell’s vision for Kennedy Center dance has been different. The New York Times reported in August that Grennell pressed now-fired dance programmers to have the Kennedy Center put out programming resembling the Fox competition show So You Think You Can Dance? before he hired Nakagawa.
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