SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

Three weeks ago, Charleston was a different place. Having been through 28 previous festivals, we had a general idea what to expect from the combined effect of 120-plus Spoleto performances, more than 700 Piccolo events and exhibits, and the thousands of attendant artists, technicians, stagehands, administrators, staff members, interns and apprentices, tourists, and audience members that make it all happen. But every one is different; each 17-day run in May and June is an entirely unknown quantity until it’s upon us, which is exactly the way Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti, and current general director Nigel Redden, like it.

Menotti chose Charleston as the site of a United States counterpart to his long-running Spoleto Festival in Spoleto, Italy, because of its old-world European charm, its walkability, its intimate size, and the number of excellent performance venues within close proximity to one another. Redden has said often that Spoleto Festival USA is specifically engineered toward completely taking over the city of Charleston for two and a half weeks each spring: a longer festival would dilute the impact of the event, as would a larger city. The two entities — Charleston and Spoleto — are built for each other.

Having just spent the last three publication cycles of the City Paper out on the streets, taking in some 63 total performances and soaking in the atmosphere of a city in thrall to the performing and visual arts, I can say that Mennoti’s and Redden’s vision remains as real, and as effective, as it’s ever been.

This year’s Spoleto festival included three U.S. premieres, the world premiere of a new orchestral work, and two jazz artists’ American debuts. It saw the return, for the third time in as many years, of Chinese music theatre to the festival. It also marked the first ever presentation of an opera (albeit in concert form) for Piccolo Spoleto, the first festival whose Opening Ceremony didn’t take place at City Hall, and the first Spoleto Festival ever without critic Robert T. Jones. This was a Mozart-heavy festival (a Spoleto opera, a Piccolo opera, two Intermezzi concerts, a film, and at least two Chamber Music concerts) — and next year is likely to be even heavier, with 2006 being Mozart’s 250th birthday. It was also one of the rainiest festivals on record, though the weather dried out just in time to provide a perfect finale setting at Middleton Place.

Spoleto produces all its own operas, and this year settled for no less than three of the budget-busting productions. They included a $503,000 Don Giovanni that completely transformed the abandoned Memminger Auditorium into a rolling hillside dotted with cherry trees in spring, summer, and autumn foliage, a pair of water-filled pools, an enormous, crumbling head fallen from an unseen statue (it was Michaelangelo’s “David,” FYI), and a seating arrangement that eliminated all the previous chairs in favor of three clusters of stadium-style seating in the corners and along the sides of the stage. Featuring an avant-garde staging that included both traditional elements and some very modern touches (period costumes, Polaroid cameras, KFC), the opera was sold out long before it opened, and was such a success that Spoleto quickly announced plans to preserve the set in the Memminger until next spring and present the work again for Spoleto 2006.

The festival’s second biggest operatic success — and one of its most popular productions this year — was director and puppeteer Basil Twist’s extraordinary take on Ottorino Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco (“Sleeping Beauty in the Woods”). Twist’s puppets, nearly all of them life-sized, made the classic tale a work of magic, with the singers standing to one side while audiences watched the puppeteers operate the remarkable creations on the Dock Street Theatre stage. La bella was one of the most talked-about of this festival’s events, selling out all but a couple of its six shows. (Twist’s opera will go up again later this summer at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival.)

On the opposite side of the most-talked-about spectrum lies Die Vögel, Walter Braunfels’ almost forgotten German opera based on Aristophanes’ play The Birds, at the Sottile. Die Vögel was positioned to be the biggest of the operatic trio, and those who saw it had superb things to say about the colorful U.S. premiere, which featured outlandish costuming, a beautifully lush score, oddly twitching performances by the singers, and a giant tree whose branches catch fire at the opera’s end. But with only four performances, just one of which took place in the festival’s first week, Die Vögel was overwhelmed by the spectacle and the chatter surrounding Don Giovanni and the festival’s other most talked about event: Mabou Mines DollHouse.

Director Lee Breuer’s avant-garde adaptation of Ibsen’s classic A Doll’s House polarized critics and audiences from the start, with its melodramatic piano accompaniment, its length (initially three hours), some risqué staging choices (e.g. simulated fellatio, nudity) and most of all Breuer’s choice to cast the male characters with actors who are all just four feet tall and women who stand nearly six feet. But more than the play itself, Breuer generated constant chatter around his many alterations to the play throughout its 17-performance run, and his regular comments to and about the press, which included a Conversations With program in which he blasted Post and Courier overview critic Blair Tindall for her negative review of the play, calling her ignorant, unqualified, “matronizing,” a “fake critic,” and unversed in the history of avant-garde theatre. Now that’s what I call theatre.

Kingdom of Desire, the adaptation of Macbeth by China’s Contemporary Legend Theatre in the Peking Opera style, was well received, even with a mere two performances at the Gaillard, though it would probably have been a better fit (in both a production and an audience sense) at the Sottile Theatre. If Spoleto continues to program Chinese opera, there’s every indication that Charleston audiences will continue to reward them.

Spoleto filled out its theatre offerings this year with a new series of one-person offerings it called Solo Turns. The three plays were big hits with audiences and critics, and they encompassed a range of styles. Mike Daisey’s The Ugly American was a monologue in the Spalding Gray vein about a few months spent studying theatre abroad in London. Waifish Hazelle Goodman channelled a dozen disparate characters in her funny and thoughtful commentary on pop culture On Edge. And S.C. native Heather Grayson’s After the Storm proved a provocative, highly theatrical account of her real experiences in the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War.

“Provocative” is not exactly what the Colla Marionettes were aiming for with their third appearance at Spoleto, but audiences were more than happy to settle for the three charming tales told in the company’s two programs. With Petruschka, Sheherazade, and Guerrino the Unfortunate, the Colla family once again proved why they’ve been one of the world’s greatest masters of marionette theatre for almost 200 years.

Netherlands-based dance collaborators Emio Greco | PC thrilled and freaked out audiences at the Sottile with that company’s provocative 90-minute work Rimasto Orfano. The twitching, trembling, spastic body language in Greco’s choreography, combined with Michael Gordon’s alternating musical silences and explosions, was a sensory experience unlike any other in recent memory. Like DollHouse, people loved it or hated it, but nobody was unmoved by it.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago gave another standout set of performances on their retrun to Spoleto for its final weekend, with a program that included a two-month-old trance-like work called “Gnawa” set to ethereal Middle-Eastern music, a dark, postmodern piece called “Enemy in the Figure,” and the company’s signature “Rooster,” set to a compilation of early Rolling Stones tunes.

Musically, the festival knocked one out of the park with this year’s Festival Concert. Beginning with a brief but remarkably engaging premiere of a work called Storm and Stress by Music in Time director John Kennedy, followed by a rousing performance by the Spoleto Festival Orchestra and pianist Andrew von Oeyen of Rachmaninoff’s infamous “knuckle buster,” the Piano Concerto No. 3. For the concert’s finale, music director and conductor Emmanuel Villaume pulled out all the stops for a thunderous Rite of Spring that had audience members jumping up and down, screaming, and cheering for the ovation.

Charles Wadsworth joked during the first of this year’s Chamber Music concerts about whether he was an “icon” or a “legend,” and truth be told Spoleto audiences don’t seem to want to have to choose between the two. Wadsworth’s popular series at the Dock Street Theatre brought back the St. Lawrence String Quartet, longtime collaborator Paula Robison, clarinetist Todd Palmer, cellist Andres Diaz, pianist Wendy Chen, violinist Chee-Yun, and introduced several newcomers, including lutenist Frederic Hand and passionate cellist Alisa Weilerstein. With their 29th series, Wadsworth continued to demostrate why the resurgence in popularity of chamber music can be attributed in large part to his efforts here and elsewhere.

John Kennedy’s four Music in Time concerts this year went for broke in the theatricality department. The first featured Kennedy tearing off a white sheet from a figure standing in a corner of the stage to expose a female mannequin, and 15 musicians playing hand-cranked music boxes. The third and fourth programs were given over to New York-based percussion ensemble So Percussion, who performed Iannis Xenakis’ monumental four-part work Pléïades in the Gaillard Exhibition Hall and a pair of new, maniacal percussion works by Annie Gosfield and David Lang. The fourth and final concert saw Kennedy himself, clad only in black cycling shorts, slapping, rubbing, and pounding his own body and the floor in Vinko Globokar’s curious performance art piece ?Corporel. We also found SFO trombonist Steven Parker in clown makeup, performing Luciano Berio’s solo work Sequenza V, and flutist Margaret Lancaster (who also appeared as the maid Helene in Mabou Mines DollHouse) performing a trio of theatrical flute solo works to an electronic loop of flute and conversation samples.

Spoleto’s Wachovia Jazz series took a hit early on when headliner Shirley Horne bowed out at the last minute due to a health emergency. (When your sub is Dianna Reeves, though, you know you’re not doing too bad.) The heavy rain that marked the festival’s first week and a half forced nearly all the Cistern’s jazz concerts indoors, up the street at the Gaillard, but they seemed no less well attended for it. (Jazz seems to have become one of this festival’s most popular series, particularly for the outdoors concerts. It’s hard to believe now that one of the reasons Menotti left in the early ‘90s was his absolute refusal to allow jazz into the festival program.)

Though Spoleto grabbed the bulk of the headlines, with its spectacle-heavy program and daily DollHouse alterations and accusations, the City-produced Piccolo Spoleto festival — with its hundreds of theatre, music, dance, film, literature, and visual arts offerings — provided a huge slate of performances and exhibits for festival goers, often at far less cost and with a decidedly more populist bent to them.

I’d love to have the space to talk about the many Piccolo events I attended, and the great way the outreach festival fills in the gaps in Spoleto’s more hard-hitting schedule. I’d love to be able to talk about critical and audience reaction to all of the performances — even just about the several music and theatre series — but I don’t have the luxury of that kind of time. All I can do is send a huge shout-out to the many performing artists and companies, from Charleston and from away, and the dozens of program coordinators who work with Ellen Dressler Moryl and the Office of Cultural Affairs who made this year’s Piccolo Spoleto a success, in spite of the rain, in spite of our inability to send a reviewer to every Piccolo event, in spite of our mixing up the photos for Lilia! and Lilita. Congrats to all of you. It’s Piccolo that truly brings Menotti’s and Redden’s vision for the festival to life.

Three years ago, when I first took on the challenge of acting as Spoleto overview critic for the City Paper, the role was a very different one. I attended as many events as I could and, each Monday, I’d write up a lengthy overview of what I’d seen and experienced during the previous week for that Wednesday’s issue of the paper. Last year, for the 28th festival, I decided to keep a daily weblog of my experiences, rather than waiting until the end of the week to begin rifling through my notes. Blogging technology was still somewhat user-unfriendly a year ago, though, and few people even knew what a blog was.

This year, that situation was quite different. Not only was I able to post hourly and daily updates to the Spoleto Buzz Blog easily (and with photos), but The Post and Courier introduced its own daily blog, hosted by staff writer Dan Conover. Dan linked regularly to posts I made on my site, and I did the same at the Spoleto Buzz Blog. Taken together, I think the two online journals provide as comprehensive a narrative as can be found for the 29th Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

I look forward to reporting on the Festival again in similar fashion next year, and watching how it and Piccolo take over the city, turning it for a short time into a carnival, a stage, an exhibition, a party, an open-air market, a pageant, and a celebration of ourselves, creating in the process a shared sense of community like no other place in the world. The change is temporary, but the effect it has on our lives last forever.

Three weeks ago, Charleston was a different place.