Kennedy Center's Rutter promises push against Washington's conservative tastes

Deborah Rutter, the new president of the Kennedy Center, told a National Press Club luncheon Wednesday that she will try to push Washington and the Center into new areas of interest and service.

"I'm told Washington is very conservative in their tastes," Rutter said in one of her first public appearances since becoming president in September. "I'm going to push you on that.”

Rutter did not lay out specific plans for the Kennedy Center, but in her prepared remarks entitled "Storytelling," she told of two incidents in her own experience that perhaps gave clues to her approach as an arts administrator in Washington.

In Chicago, where she headed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 11 years, members of the orchestra scattered “to all parts of the city, especially those without access to music — even to the prisons,” she said. Two members of the chorus went weekly to suburban Warrenville to a state detention center for young women, and worked with the girls in writing and telling their stories.

When performance time came, “powerful emotions'' filled the detention center, Rutter said. "Some of those families had never heard their daughter or sister communicate so directly, they didn’t know she had that power to share. The story was untold and therefore unknown. That hour of performance changed the lives of those families forever."

"That's what I mean by art for life's sake," she said, as the luncheon audience broke into unaccustomed applause.

Rutter also said she was largely the product of a public school education, and that she took up the violin at a teacher's urging.

She said she believes "fervently” that every child in the country needs to 'find' himself or herself, whether in arts or education.

Rutter, the first woman to become president of the Kennedy Center, came to Washington from Chicago, after serving in similar positions with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Answering questions after her address, Rutter said she had met top White House aide Valerie Jarrett during her first week on the job, and was meeting with Education Secretary Arne Duncan later in the day. "We're indebted to the Obamas for their commitment in so many ways," she said.

She was asked about various programs now under the Kennedy Center's umbrella. She called the National Symphony Orchestra’s director Christoph Eschenbach “an extraordinary musician.” Regarding the future of the Washington Opera Company, she said, reassuringly, that there has been opera and ballet for centuries.

The "symbolic nature" of the Kennedy Center Honors is "really important,” she said, and noted that "although things do change,” there are no plans to change the Millennium Stage, now in its 14th year.

In her closing comment, Rutter said that being an arts administrator was 'hard work." But then, recalling "the joy of the young women at the detention center,” she said that was “the greatest reward."