The artists who won’t cancel Kennedy, and why

From an article in The Atlantic:

… Most scheduled performers have not canceled. In the first month of Trump’s chairmanship, the Center hosted a children’s play based on the Navajo creation myth; a class on Caribbean-carnival dancing that teaches, “Every Body is a Carnival Body”; a Klezmer band that plays Yiddish labor music; an Afro-Cuban jazz singer who performs in Spanish; a Black jazz singer who performed a song in the South African click language of Xhosa; a Black low-country Gullah band; and an “oratorio on the fight for women’s suffrage…”

Artists who are choosing to perform tend to approach the matter differently. They’re focused on the tangible effects of their decisions, not on whether their conscience is weighed down by the new chairman’s anti-“wokey”-ness.

Abigale Reisman, the violinist for the Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band, told me that her initial reaction after Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover was “Fuck them all; fuck the whole place.” But after thinking about the situation, seeking out other opinions, and spending an entire rehearsal talking about it instead of rehearsing, she and the rest of the band decided to play their March 5 gig.

They were swayed, in part, by the realization that pulling out might wind up punishing the Kennedy Center staff. One employee’s testimony was especially persuasive: “His message to all of us was ‘Don’t abandon us,’” recalls Nat Seelen, the band’s clarinetist. Another group the performers didn’t want to abandon: the audience…

More here.

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