The National Endowment for the Arts awarded 50 grants aligned with America250 this year, directing $25,000 each to Carolina Ballet, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Rochester City Ballet and Calpulli Mexican Dance Company of East Elmhurst, New York — after the Trump administration cut the NEA's Challenge America program, which had funded arts in underserved communities, in 2025.

The federal push for semiquincentennial programming lands at a complicated moment for American artists. As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, dance organizations have taken sharply different approaches: some celebrate, some ignore the milestone, and some choreograph through its contradictions.

Carolina Ballet offered a full-throated version in April with its "Celebration of American Music" program, featuring George Balanchine's rah-rah Stars and Stripes. Dallas Black Dance Theatre took a more nuanced route in February, using its grant to support Bodies as Site of Faith and Protest, a work set to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "We Shall Overcome" speech, choreographed by Tommie-Waheed Evans. Calpulli toured a program in April highlighting the contributions of Mexican Americans to the U.S.

Many ballet companies reached into existing repertory — drawing on 20th-century masters like Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille — to honor the anniversary without divisive political messaging. San Francisco Ballet artistic director Tamara Rojo programmed Balanchine's Stars and Stripes in February alongside other U.S.-made pieces. Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's February 2026 "America 250" program featured a quartet of works, including a Stars and Stripes pas de deux, Lisa de Ribere's baseball-themed The Mighty Casey, and Paul Taylor's ode to American World War II soldiers, Company B.

In May, Tulsa Ballet carried the anniversary abroad, presenting its "Made in America" program at London's Royal Opera House. "I thought we better go there with something that is representative of who we are, so I thought carefully about how to best represent our company and our country," artistic director Marcello Angelini says. "We are the official cultural ambassador for Oklahoma, and I take that responsibility seriously." The London evening featured three American-made works — Yuri Possokhov's Classical Symphony, Nicolo Fonte's Divenire and Broadway choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler's Remember Our Song — chosen, Angelini says, to reflect the diversity of the U.S.

Some choreographers have practiced patriotic dancemaking for decades. Mark Morris has presented programs under the title "Dances to American Music" for years; this year the Mark Morris Dance Group offered evenings of his works set to American composers including George Gershwin, Henry Cowell, Bob Wills and Lou Harrison.

Asked whether he engaged specifically with the semiquincentennial, Morris replies: "Sure. I'm all for it. I think it's great." He notes that he moved to New York City in 1976, the year of the bicentennial. "And I'm very glad to be an American artist, but I can't defend a lot of things the U.S. is doing right now," he says. Still, he declines to elaborate. "I don't want to talk about politics specifically, because I think if you can win a prize for it, whatever it is, it's less likely to be art," he says. "That's my feeling about politics as well as political art."

The Martha Graham Dance Company looked to its own history: it has spent three years celebrating its 1926 founding, completing the cycle in tandem with America250. Artistic director Janet Eilber followed the lead of Graham's repertory, which often lionizes the individual and democratic ideals, programming classic Americana pieces like Appalachian Spring and Frontier alongside older works like Lamentation and Steps in the Street — the latter still resonant for their emphasis on social justice and community. New works by Hope Boykin and Tommie-Waheed Evans, inspired by Graham's revolutionary spirit, rounded out the season.

"There is often a lot of talk about her choreographic legacy," says Eilber, who worked closely with Graham for nearly a decade. "What we're interested in is [Graham's] legacy of innovation. She was always looking to the future. That was her directive: We need to keep our eyes open."

Not everyone is waving the flag. Doug Varone pulled his eponymous company out of the Kennedy Center's 2025–26 season earlier this year, responding to the purge that instated Donald Trump as chairman of the performing arts center's governing board. Varone is in no mood to celebrate America250 with fireworks.

"Given the moment the country is in right now, I'm looking at my programming in terms of the messages I'm sending out," he says. His recently premiered No Matter What the End, set to Radiohead's In Rainbows, responds to the changes in the nation and its capital. "While it's not a political work, the dance is about all the things we're feeling right now: It feels aggressive, lonely, isolated, confused," Varone says. "It is an opportunity for me as an artist to talk about what's important to me. I love that the art speaks for itself, and becomes the place to talk about what we're actually seeing and feeling."

Others have turned dance into explicit protest. Over the past few months, Broadway choreographer and former dancer Matthew Steffens has created two site-specific works called ResistDance for the First Amendment Troop. The first dramatized the final moments of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the two civilians killed by ICE officers in Minneapolis in January; performed and filmed in Washington, DC, in front of the Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Memorial, it has earned more than 70 million views. The second, also performed at the Lincoln Memorial plaza and also viral online, drew on the controversy surrounding the release of the Epstein files.

For Steffens, art that wrestles with this political moment is itself a patriotic act. "In celebrating the 250 years of our country, we can celebrate its greatness, as well as celebrate the obstacles that we have had as a country, and are continuing to face as a country," he says. "If we don't say anything in our art, and don't make audiences think, how are we going to make any forward progress? And if art goes away, then we leave a vacuum."

As the anniversary year continues, the split between celebration and critique running through American dance suggests the field's answer to patriotism will remain contested — and choreographed in real time.