The busiest performing arts venue in the United States isn’t
in New York City (population, just under 8.5 million). It’s not in Los Angeles (3.8 million), or
even in Chicago (2.7 million). It’s in
the Nation’s Capital, Washington, D.C. (650,000). The
John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, opened in 1971, hosts about 2,000 performances a year for
audiences totaling nearly two million—three times the city’s population! (New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts, opened in 1962 and at 16.3 acres, the largest performing arts space in
the world, presents 400 performances on its campus, with an attendance of 3.5
million spectators; LCPA’s constituent organizations, not all of whom perform
exclusively at Lincoln Center itself, produce as many as 5,000
performances. The Performing Arts Center
of Los Angeles County, which opened in 1964 as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion,
presents more than 30 performances a year to 1.3 million spectators. Chicago doesn’t have an operating
multi-theater, variable-use performance center.)
The idea for a National Cultural Center in Washington began
to surface in the 1930s, promoted by then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Nothing came of the first discussions except
some congressional hearings in 1935, but in the 1950s, during the Dwight
Eisenhower administration (1953-61) and the post-World War II economic upturn,
the notion gained currency. Between 1955
and 1958, despite controversy over concept, cost, and location, Congress
debated the proposal to build a large performing arts center in the
Capital. In 1958, Congress passed the National Cultural Center Act and
President Eisenhower signed it into law.
Architect Edward Durell Stone was selected as architect for the project
and by 1959, the price tag had risen to $61 million ($492 million in 2014
dollars), but despite the increase in cost, payment for which was mandated to
be by private funding, the designs were well received by the press and were
quickly approved by the pertinent government agencies.
When John F. Kennedy, a
lifelong supporter and advocate of the arts, took office (1961), he made the realization
of the National Cultural Center one of his highest priorities. He called the arts “our contribution to the
human spirit,” words inscribed on the River Terrace outside the Grand Foyer,
and appointed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy
and former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower honorary co-chairmen of the Center to
help raise funds. The name of the
new complex was changed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
in January1964, two months after the assassination of President Kennedy on 22
November 1963. In a December 1963 letter to the
Senate and House chairmen of the Committee on Renaming the National Cultural Center in honor of JFK, President
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69) wrote: “It seems to me that a center for the
performing arts . . . would be one of the most appropriate memorials that a
grateful nation could establish to honor a man who had such deep and abiding
convictions about the importance of cultural activities in our national life.” Johnson signed the bill making the name-change
official on 23 January 1964.
Ground was broken at the Foggy Bottom site by President
Johnson on 2 December 1964, excavation
began ten days later, and construction got underway in 1967. The Kennedy Center had its formal opening
ceremony on 8 September 1971 with
the gala première of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass,
a requiem for JFK which had actually débuted on the 5th in a performance before
the general public, inaugurating the Opera House (2,350 seats), one of the Center’s three main
performance spaces. (On 10 September,
Alberto Ginastera’s opera Beatrix Cenci premièred at the Opera House for
its traditional opening.) The Concert
Hall (2,442 seats) was inaugurated
on 9 September 1971, at a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Antal Doráti, and the Eisenhower Theatre (1,100 seats) opened on
18 October with a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House starring Claire Bloom (in a new translation by
playwright Christopher Hampton that had played on Broadway in rep with Hedda Gabler earlier in the year). KCPA is the home of the National Symphony
Orchestra (Concert Hall), the Washington National Opera (Opera House), and the Washington
Ballet (Eisenhower). KCPA has made its
stages available to companies without adequate home bases, such as the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (2001-05;
now located in the Penn Quarter of downtown Washington) and the Synetic Theater (2006-11;
now installed in Arlington, Virginia).
Other KC performance
spaces include the 324-seat Family Theater (formerly the American Film
Institute Film Theater) that opened in 2005; it specializes in showing family
theater performances for the nation’s young audiences. The 513-seat Terrace Theater was built in the late
1970s on the roof terrace level as an intimate venue for chamber music, ballet,
and contemporary dance and theater. The Theater Lab, seating 399 patrons, has
housed Shear Madness, a
whodunit spoof originally written by German playwright Paul Pörtner, continuously
since August 1987. The Millennium Stage is part of
Performing Arts for Everyone, a program established by then-Kennedy Center Chairman
James Johnson in the winter of 1997 to provide free performances every evening
at 6 o’clock on two specially created stages at either end of the Grand Foyer. In March 2003, the former Education Resource
Center was renamed the Terrace Gallery, now the home of the KC Jazz Club. KCPA also
hosts several events and programs every year in its various spaces, such as the
American College Theater Festival (since 1969), the Kennedy Center Honors
(1978), and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (1998); Very Special Arts,
established in 1974 by Jean Kennedy Smith for people with disabilities, became
the Kennedy Center’s Department of VSA and Accessibility in 2011.
The original
Kennedy Center building, set on a 17-acre site on the banks of the Potomac
River, was designed by Edward Durell Stone with a height of 100 feet, length of
630 feet, and width of 300 feet. The
Center features a 630-foot-long, 63-foot-high Grand Foyer, and the Hall of
States and the Hall of Nations are both 250 feet long and 63 feet high. The building has been praised for its
acoustics, and the 80,000-square-foot terrace overlooking the river. (The
River Terrace, open to the public free of charge, offers four panoramas: the
Rosslyn, Virginia, skyline to the west; the Potomac River and National Airport
to the south; Washington Harbor and the Watergate complex to the north; the Lincoln
Memorial, the State Department, George Washington University, and the Saudi Arabian
embassy—KCPA’s Foggy Bottom neighbors—to the east.) However, as time went on, many performing arts
journalists, architecture critics, and patrons have raised complaints about the
inaccessibility from KCPA to the river, the Mall, and the other presidential
monuments and memorials to which the original building provided no
direct route. In the New
York Times, architecture critic Ida Louise Huxtable, who died in
January 2013, described the edifice
as “a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art
of architecture lies buried” and quipped, “Albert Speer would have approved.” Then-New
York Times theater reviewer Clive Barnes expressed delight that at last “New
York no longer has the ugliest opera house in North America.”
By 1990, the
condition of the Kennedy Center had so deteriorated that Congress appropriated
$27.7 million for capital improvements. From
1995 to 2005, over $200 million of federal funds were allocated to KCPA for
long-term capital projects and repairs, and to bring the center into compliance
with modern fire-safety and handicap-accessibility codes. Improvements included renovations to the
Concert Hall, Opera House, and plaza-level public spaces; renovations to the
Eisenhower Theater were completed in 2008.
Then, in January 2013, the Kennedy Center announced preliminary plans
for a $100 million expansion of its facilities.
In addition to its practical purposes of adding dedicated educational,
rehearsal, and event space, as well as administrative offices, the tentative expansion,
according to a recent press release, will improve “access to and from
the Kennedy Center, NAMA [National Mall and Memorial Parks], the Rock Creek
Paved Recreation Trail, the Potomac River waterfront, and surrounding vicinity.” It will be the first renovation of the
Kennedy Center in a decade and is a more modest reinstatement of a 2005 planned
reconstruction that foundered when funding fell through. Groundbreaking for the expansion project is
scheduled for December, with the
opening of the new construction planned for May 2017, for the 100th
anniversary of JFK’s birth.
Steven Holl, with senior partner Chris McVoy of New York’s Steven
Holl Architects in partnership with BNIM Architects of Kansas City, has been
selected as the architect to lead the up-date of Edward Durell Stone’s original KC design for what Philip
Kennicott, Pulitzer Prize-winning art
and architecture critic of the Washington Post, called “the legendary marble box of
culture.” “Long isolated from the city by a
warren of highways,” lamented Kennicott, “and disconnected from the Potomac
River by a cantilevered balcony that limits access to Washington’s most
splendid natural asset, the Kennedy Center has been a study in urban isolation
since its opening in 1971.”
In fact, the physical and artistic isolation of KCPA has
been an issue of long standing. In March
2011, the Washington Post published columns on the Kennedy Center
by critics of classical music (Anne Midgette), theater (Peter Marks), jazz (Matt
Schudel), dance (Sarah Kaufman), and design (Kennicott), and all of them voiced
a variation on this complaint: “How did the Kennedy Center lose its way .
. .?” as Architect magazine’s Kriston
Capps phrased it. Stone’s
original Kennedy Center design, before budgetary constraints abbreviated the
plan, connected it to the Potomac with a curving veranda. Kennicott suggests that Holl’s concept,
inspired by Stone’s initial vision (and subject to change), may be about to restore
that idea.
The pragmatic end
of the project, three new connected pavilions to be constructed south of the existing building, will remedy the fact that the Kennedy
Center, with its 1.5 million square feet of space, was designed with inadequate
rehearsal, classrooms, or event space, and only one office. The largest performing arts education program
in the nation, working with 11
million children a year, KCPA contains no dedicated classrooms. The
Kennedy Center also needs large rehearsal space for its 2,000 yearly productions
of theater, opera, and ballet, and work space for its training of arts managers.
Former Kennedy Center President
Michael M. Kaiser founded the DeVos
Institute of Arts Management in 2001 and it’s grown since then. (Kaiser stepped down from his post as KC
president in September, but will stay on until 2017 to run the DeVos Institute.)
But the most salient
changes will be in the public spaces. These will include gardens that will blend the Center with the surrounding
landscape and the Potomac River. “The overall concept was to fuse
architecture and landscape,” says
Holl. “Right from the beginning, I thought of the idea of getting down
to the river, that this shouldn’t just be a pragmatic object added on to the
existing Kennedy Center.” The proposed plans also include new landscaping,
including a reflecting pool. To avoid
interrupting the present structure’s silhouette, over half of the new pavilion
space will be underground, and the expansion will connect below grade and also through
the main plaza that will be created with the removal of the existing south
terrace wall. One pavilion,
accessed by two elevated walkways spanning Rock Creek Parkway, will house an open-air
stage floating on the Potomac River, rising and falling with the water level. The second pavilion will serve as a new
entrance to the Center for arrivals by bus; the third and largest pavilion, called
the “Glissando” because its curved shape is a visual expression of the rapid swoop
of sounds that’s a familiar characteristic of the harp or piano, would contain the
classrooms and rehearsal studios. An
outdoor wall of the Glissando Pavilion will be a gigantic screen for the
projection of simulcast performances and other multimedia events.
Glass is a prominent element in the new design. In addition to the projection wall, the
pavilions will have windows so that visitors can watch the creative work unfold
in many of the rehearsal rooms. Along
with Carrara marble, the same Italian marble from which Stone created the
original façade, the new additions will be clad in translucent Okalux. An
insulating glass that diffuses light, “It glows like a Japanese lantern,” Holl has said.
The plans are to attract
visitors to the Kennedy Center with the outdoor stage and the gardens where they
can see a free performance, eat at a new restaurant, or picnic by the river. (The open-air stage brings to mind the
“Water Gate Steps,” the staircase that leads down from the Lincoln Memorial
grounds to the Potomac where there once was a stage on a barge that hosted
popular summer concerts between 1935 and 1965.
Anyone who’s seen the 1958 Cary Grant-Sophia Loren movie Houseboat will know this site.) Holl’s
preliminary plans also call for a memorial garden in honor of JFK which may
include 46 Gingko trees to commemorate Kennedy’s life span and 35 rows of lavender
to denote that he was the 35th U.S. president. Former KC president Kaiser sees a performing arts
museum as part of the expansion and the Center’s new chairman, Deborah F. Rutter, who took over the post in September, hopes
that the new developments will create informal spaces that will
encourage patrons and visitors to interact with artists. “We
wanted to make an artistic statement,” said Kaiser. “We weren’t just looking for a mini version of
what we had.”
The new addition
will add a modest 60,000 square feet to the existing structure, compared with
the whopping 400,000-square-foot plan that was proposed in 2003 (at a
cost of $650 million—$837 million today).
Anticipating a federal outlay of $400 million, the funding didn’t
materialize and the whole effort was shelved in 2005. In the present effort, half the $100 million
expected cost has been donated by philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, current KC
chair. It’s the single largest gift in
the institution’s history and is among
the largest ever given to any federally-supported nonprofit organization. Said Rubenstein, “When you’re the chairman of
something, you have the obligation to be a leader.”
Architect Holl has
said he’s moved by contributing to an edifice that honors JFK. “Kennedy was so important for me,” admitted Holl,
who’d have been not quite 13 when JFK was elected in 1960. The enabling legislation that named the John
F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts also designated it “the living
memorial” to the slain president and “the sole national monument to his memory”
in the Capital. The façade of the
original building is festooned with quotations on the arts from Kennedy, and
Holl followed a similar pattern on the expansion structures with Kennedy’s
statements about water. One
famous Kennedy quotation, “When we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or
to watch it, we are going back from whence we came,” would be sandblasted into
the glass walls of the floating pavilion. Paying homage to the young JFK’s wartime
service in the navy, the reflecting pool in the green space will have the same
dimensions as PT 109, the famous torpedo boat Lieutenant Kennedy skippered in the
Pacific. The decking of the pool will be
the same mahogany planks as the legendary PT boat.
There are still objections to the Kennedy Center’s design,
even as amended by Holl’s expansion. As Philip
Kennicott protests, “Unfortunately, nothing in the new plan addresses the
atrocious architecture of the main Kennedy Center building, a giant box of
ostentatious red carpet and dispiriting, Soviet-scaled corridors, with no
central social hub and inferior acoustics dogging the overscale Concert Hall.” The architecture writer also observes that the
new link to the river, though welcome, would not be direct enough to allow
spectators to walk down during intermissions, and there’ll still be no
connection to the restaurants at 23rd and E Streets, the Foggy Bottom Metro
station, or the busy neighborhood of the George Washington University
campus. “But it is a start,”
acknowledged Kennicott, and “a little bit of life will flow in through a new
side channel, and that will be a distinct improvement.”
I guess I’m just not as perceptive as Kennicott, Huxtable,
and Barnes, or as demanding—at least architecturally speaking. I’ve never felt as alienated at the Kennedy
Center as they seem to have, and most of my performance experiences there have
been excellent. The United States has
never really had a national theater, and maybe that’s right. Theater and performing arts in the U.S. has
never really been centralized like it has been in England or France, where London
and Paris served not only as the countries’ governmental seats but the cultural
ones as well. (We’re more like Germany,
which has important theaters, opera companies, and orchestras all over the
country.) In our earliest colonial days,
theater centers were established not only in New York City but in Philadelphia,
Boston, New Orleans (originally French, of course), Baltimore, and Charleston. As the country expanded west, important
theaters were founded in Chicago and San Francisco. In the 1940s, what we now call regional
theaters arose all across the country, many of then in cities that became
fertile grounds for theater, such as Milwaukee, Seattle, Houston, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. By the ’80s, Washington itself became a go-to
destination for theater with the Arena Stage, Catholic University’s theater
program, the National Theatre for pre- and post-Broadway tours, and eventually,
the Kennedy Center and the smaller Off-Broadway- and Off-Off-Broadway-level
troupes that have proliferated here for several decades now. Sure, New York remains the preeminent theater
center in the U.S., but companies and productions, writers, actors and directors
have made many cities focuses of exciting theater work independent of the Big
Apple and the Great White Way. (I
recently published an old report on the Theatre of Nations in 1986—see the post
on 10 November—and one complaint about the U.S. theater scene then was that the
artists of the various regional theater centers didn’t communicate with those
in the other regions and so remained walled off from each other’s work. That’s just less true today than it was 28
years ago.)
In 1984, an attempt to launch an official American National
Theater at the Kennedy Center was short lived, lasting only until 1986. It was a collaborative effort between KCPA,
then newly under the direction of the very young (and, I say, superlatively
arrogant) Peter Sellars (he was all of 26), and the long-dormant American
National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), established in 1935 by Congressional
charter. There was much caviling that
such a project ought to have been located in New York City, the theater capital
of the United States (if not the world), but I always felt that it belonged in
the Nation’s Capital. (Of course, I’m a
self-proclaimed D.C. chauvinist.) Probably an ANT, should the concept be
revived, shouldn’t be modeled on the Royal National Theatre of the U.K., but
operate as a showcase of U.S. theater art and productions from around the country,
as well as from abroad to expose U.S. audiences and artists to the work of
theater artists from other nations and cultures. (Organizations like Lincoln Center and the
Brooklyn Academy of Music do an excellent job of this latter, however.)
Providing a platform for regional excellence
was, in fact, part of the Sellars plan for ANT at the Kennedy Center, and he
did host a Chicago season with productions from the then-nascent Wisdom Bridge
and Steppenwolf troupes. (The complete
plan for ANT included original productions and it was there, I think, that the
concept foundered. Sellars’s selections
were ill-advised and his response to the negative reception from both press and
audiences was condescending.)
If the Kennedy Center is to have a life as an
official or unofficial national theater—and the same criteria would hold for KC’s
music, opera, and dance presentations as well—it probably ought to be as a
national spotlight for the best and most interesting—including, I’d hope, the most
challenging—art developed and presented across out country. The newly-enhanced facilities, when they’re
realized, will make this mission not only more possible, but really
obligatory. This is so not just because
the Center’s located in Washington, but because of its namesake. An arts memorial to JFK ought by mandate to
present the nation’s cultural pride, both what has been created all along its
formative continuum, and what’s being forged now, breaking new ground and
pushing the envelop in the major theater centers of the country and the little
pockets where sometimes surprising new ideas pop up as if by magic. Those are what the new John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts should house and spotlight—in the capital city of the
people who invented jazz, rock ’n’ roll, and the American musical; baseball,
American football, and basketball; telephone and television; and moon rockets. That’s the true “contribution to the
human spirit” of the most innovative and inventive society on Earth.
On 8 May, the Washington Post reported that officials at the Kennedy Center have altered the expansion plans to eliminate the floating stage on the Potomac River because of issues raised about environmental impact and concerns expressed by boaters. The outdoor stage will be replaced by three pavilions on land on the south side of the existing building; the new pavilions will be connected to the riverfront by a pedestrian bridge over Rock Creek Parkway to the footpaths along the river, connecting the arts center to the water and walkways to Georgetown and the Lincoln Memorial. The change in plans, which was announced at a meeting on 7 May, will raise the cost of the project, but center officials wouldn’t say by how much. It will also delay the planned opening date of the expansion from 29 May 2017, the 100th anniversary of President Kennedy’s birth, to September 2018. Construction is now expected to start in the fall if all approvals from the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts are received in the coming months.
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