U.S. embassy and consulate websites or www.state.gov.
We’ve gone social!
Follow us on our facebook pages and join the conversation.
17 December 2009
Five Performing Arts Legends Receive Kennedy Center Tribute
Honorees represent diverse backgrounds, artistic disciplines
Washington — Each year, for more than three decades, Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has saluted a new group of celebrated performers: men and women whose talent, craftsmanship and artistic vision offer a unique distillation of American values.
The 2009 honorees who were feted recently were film and theater writer/director Mel Brooks, jazz master Dave Brubeck, operatic soprano Grace Bumbry, film actor and community activist Robert De Niro and songwriter/performer/rock icon Bruce Springsteen.
As their achievements were recounted — first by President Obama at an afternoon reception, and later by others at the center’s annual gala tribute on December 6 — the diverse components of their lives were showcased as essential factors in their interpretation of the American experience.
To be sure, artistic diversity can take many forms — determined not only ethnically and geographically, but socially and experientially, as well as in terms of overall creative impact. Viewed in these terms, the 2009 Kennedy Center honorees serve as a mirror of the roots, the eclecticism and the resiliency of the nation.
Brubeck, through his artistic imagination and improvisational daring over “six decades of revolutionary rhythms,” in the president’s words, has created a body of work that defies the conventional cadence of his musical genre itself. And it has been endlessly varied — ranging widely and refreshingly across the musical landscape, embracing the classical and the sacred, and bringing those elements together in Brubeck’s vision of jazz.
Brooks’ skewed sense of humor — notably, his farcical social commentary on everything from Western movies and horror films to the ebbs and flows of ancient and contemporary world history— has endeared him to audiences worldwide. Through a variety of pop-culture media — film and theater, television and the recorded word — Brooks has made people laugh. Yet behind the double-entendres, puns and gags, amid “all the insanity and absurdity,” Obama said, “there’s been a method to Mel’s madness” that illuminates “uncomfortable truths about racism and sexism and anti-Semitism.” And, apart from his role as writer, actor and director, Brooks guided several projects to the screen that shone a spotlight on society’s bleak outer fringe: the forgotten souls who dwell on the periphery.
Bumbry — an African American denied entrance to one music school because of her race — taught the world a lesson by confronting and overcoming prejudice, rising to stardom during the era of opera’s racial integration in the United States. Situated, chronologically, between African-American singers Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, Bumbry symbolized her changing times — the 1960s and 1970s — and became an international success in the process. By mastering the delicate balance between mezzo-soprano and soprano, “she not only triumphed in different techniques, she transformed them,” the president said.
On a superficial level, De Niro’s worldwide fame revolves around his memorable darker roles — in movies from The Godfather: Part II and The Deer Hunter to Taxi Driver and Raging Bull — embodying what Obama termed “some of the most iconic and intense characters ever portrayed on film.” In recent years, De Niro has lightened up a bit, revealing his humorous side in several comedies centering on offbeat families. Throughout, he’s never strayed far, emotionally or creatively, from the so-called “mean streets” of Lower Manhattan, the New York City neighborhood in which he was raised as a first-generation Italian American. In fact, as a tribute to his beloved New York City in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, De Niro created a landmark event the next year. The Tribeca Film Festival, situated in the environs where the World Trade Center once stood, draws entries from around the globe. Since 2002, more than five dozen countries have been represented at the festival. In October 2009, a sister event, the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, was launched in Qatar.
Springsteen, the gifted performer and composer who with his beloved E Street Band has captured the spirit of his generation over the past several decades, uses music to tell America’s story to the world. The lyrics of his songs chronicle the lives of ordinary Americans, ranging from the disaffected youth who is “Born to Run” to workers struggling to make ends meet, from combat-weary soldiers who were “Born in the U.S.A.” to the citizens of a country doggedly “Rising” as it recovers from the trauma of September 11. Springsteen’s concerts, the president said, are “communions” with “a place for everybody — [conveying] the sense that no matter who you are or what you do, everyone deserves … a little bit of dignity; everybody deserves to be heard.”
Alluding to the title of a Springsteen song, Obama hailed the newest Kennedy Center honorees, whose works collectively suggest that “with respect for the past, we can keep strong the traditions and values that enrich us all; that with confidence in the present and in ourselves, we can overcome whatever comes our way; and that with faith in the future, America’s greatest ‘Glory Days’ are still to come.”
