Kennedy Center Honors recipients R. Daltrey, P. Townshend, G. Jones (top row), and T. Tharp, M. Freeman and B. Streisand (bottom row)

Washington — The American cultural community honors its artists — and, by extension, the national culture itself — through a wide range of awards, each devoted to one genre.

Only one celebration, however — the annual Kennedy Center Honors — places all forms of performing arts within its sights. This means that a wealth of artists across the landscape of film, theater, classical music, dance and a range of popular music — country, rock, blues, soul — are candidates for inclusion in the five or six tributes each year.

It is fitting that the honorees are selected by an artists’ committee representing the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts: a nearly four-decade-old institution that has become, in essence, the national arts complex. Through its blend of performances, free events, community festivals and a focus on international as well as national culture, the Kennedy Center has situated itself at the pinnacle of the arts in the United States.

The 31st annual Honors ceremony saluted actress-singer-film director Barbra Streisand, stage and screen actor Morgan Freeman, visionary choreographer Twyla Tharp, trailblazing country singer George Jones and two irrepressible British musicians, vocalist Roger Daltrey and guitarist Peter Townshend of The Who, one of the most influential bands in the history of rock music.

The Honors weekend consisted of two principal segments: the bestowing of multicolored ribbons at a U.S. Department of State dinner hosted by the secretary of state on December 6, and a star-studded gala at the Kennedy Center on the evening of December 7, with the president and vice president in attendance.

“It’s time to celebrate the many ways in which art and music bind us together, not just as Americans, but as a broader human community,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “We may speak different languages, come from different cultures, hail from different lands, but we share the same fundamental ideals and aspirations: to make the world a better place with our own unique contributions.”

Actress-singer Beyoncé poses on the red carpet at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors awards in Washington.

Streisand’s journey took her from nightclub singing to Broadway stardom (in the musical hit Funny Girl) to unforgettable film roles (in Hello, Dolly! and The Way We Were) to directing movies (Yentl). Freeman was a late bloomer who — in movies such as Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawshank Redemption — has made up for those frustrating early years. Tharp found a way to stretch the bounds of choreography. Jones battled various forms of addiction and heartbreak, with angst becoming a core component of his music. And explosive London rockers Daltrey and Townshend — besides bringing a unique rawness to their musical genre — helped revive American blues music.

An unmistakable grittiness binds the 2008 honorees together, a palpable determination not only to achieve, but also to overcome diverse challenges confronting them. None of them had an uncomplicated path to success, as their colleagues pointed out in remarks at the gala.

Actress-singer Queen Latifah, for example, hailed Streisand’s gift for “crossing over the boundaries, jumping over barriers” to emerge from a single-parent upbringing and shape her own aspirations. Fellow performer Glenn Close cited Streisand’s vision and audacity in tackling projects others might not have dared to try. “An original doesn’t conform to our expectations,” Close said. “She changes them forever.”

Freeman, born and raised in the segregated U.S. South, had spent years as a waiter and taxi driver while acting in modest New York theater productions and children’s television. He was 50 when he gained his first important movie role. Major parts followed, inspiring younger talents such as Denzel Washington, who said he was struck by Freeman’s “God-given sense of timing and great ear for nuance.” He took on characters who, in the words of fellow actor and friend Clint Eastwood, “reflect the human heart and glorify the human experience.” Today, with the role of Nelson Mandela in Freeman’s immediate future, he “finds the moral center in each character he plays,” Eastwood said, and is “in love with life and at peace with himself, a man who kept to his dream.”

Jones, whose journey took him from the backwoods of east Texas to the pantheon of country music, created a wealth of “sad, sobbin’ tearjerkers,” as first lady Laura Bush said of the ironic, bittersweet songs that captivated her and her fellow schoolgirls, who eagerly fed coins into the jukeboxes that played his records. “The ache in his voice tore at listeners’ hearts,” she said.

In fashioning choreography that drew on the likes of The Beach Boys, Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra; in creating a pop piece for classical Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov; in seeing dance — as actress Lily Tomlin observed — even in “a kid jumping over a crack in a sidewalk,” Tharp “took tradition apart and remade dance for our time.” Noting that Daltrey and Townshend have inspired and touched fans all over the world, actor Jack Black described the duo as “legends in a time of legends, [in] the world of rock.”

The power of the arts, Rice said, is “to give expression to the human spirit, to give expression to human freedom, to give expression to human will.”

The 2008 Kennedy Center honorees — like the dozens of creative artists who have been saluted at the center over the past three decades — wield that power fearlessly, and invite others to do so.