Stephen Nakagawa was announced as the new director of dance programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Aug. 25. The news came three days after the previous dance director, Jane Rabinovitz Raleigh, and two other staffers in the department were fired.

Nakagawa is a dancer and now-former Washington Ballet member. His contract with the company was not renewed in May, but by August he’d landed the gig at the Kennedy Center on the heels of a letter he sent to its president, Richard Grenell.

According to the New York Times, Nakagawa wrote in the letter that he hopes to bring a “return to classical ballet’s purity and timeless beauty.” He complained about “radical leftist ideologies in ballet,” his increasing concern about “the direction the ballet world is taking in Am

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