For the first time in the nearly 50-year history of the event, the Kennedy Center Honors will not be held inside the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts this year, the center announced Friday.
With the main building currently closed to the public, and safety assessments still underway, the center announced it plans to move the celebration of American performing arts to Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C., which seats around 20,000 people compared to the 2,300 seats in the center’s Opera House, where the awards ceremony has traditionally been held.
This year’s ceremony is scheduled for Dec. 7. The center says they will announce this year’s honorees at a later date.
Even the 2020 Kennedy Center Honors, held belatedly in May of 2021 due to the Coronavirus pandemic, included performances that were taped over several days at various locations throughout the Kennedy Center’s campus.
The change of venue for the storied event comes as the main theaters at the Kennedy Center have been closed since Sept. 15, after the center’s board voted to close for renovations. In court filings, Executive Director Matt Floca explained the closure would be reconsidered on a week-by-week basis, depending on the status of ongoing safety assessment.
The Kennedy Center’s board had cited a partial ceiling collapse in the center’s Grand Foyer last month as evidence that the center needed to be immediately closed for repairs.
A construction consultant and the center’s director “consider the main building to be unsafe for continued occupancy, and anticipate further risk to the public and employees if the building is not immediately closed and renovations begun,” the board said in a draft resolution to close the center for two years during the planned construction.
But President Donald Trump has previously said renovations wouldn’t happen — and the building could potentially even be demolished — unless his name was added to the building — something a federal judge has blocked multiple times as litigation over the closure and effort to rename the center proceeds.
“The closing will take place immediately, however, the Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in September. “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
The White House declined to comment to NBC News about the change in venue for the annual awards ceremony.
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