SPOLETO BUZZ BLOG

It’s nearly over. Only today’s finale remains yet to be experienced, and I’m feeling exhausted, relieved, and more than a little sad. Over at Dan Conover’s Spoletoblog, he reports that Blair Tindall writes in today’s Post and Courier, in a festival retrospective, that she attended 37 events over the course of Spoleto’s 17 days. That’s particularly impressive in light of the fact that Tindall’s never tackled this job before. Following in Robert Jones footsteps would have been a difficult task for anyone; when I spoke with Tindall in the Spoleto press room at one point mid-festival, she mentioned that the process had been one big learning curve for her, and she was still feeling her way into the best process for managing her time. My hat’s off to her for taking on the challenge at all. My feeling is she did as good a job as anyone could have asked for.

My own count on events attended is somewhere between 59-64; I’ve tried to go back and recall every single performance and festival-related event I made it to, but several of them were spontaneous decisions not on my schedule, and others I only ducked into to get a feel for what was happening before I cut and hightailed it to something else. Still others were events that were of neither Piccolo nor Spoleto: the Domain magazine launch party, for example, and my own performance and work in the A Perfect Ten short play showcase last Thursday night.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to write here about everything I saw or experienced, much as I wanted to. This often happened when I saw four more more events in a single day; finding the time to write (often in the Spoleto press room at the Gaillard or in Port City Java at King and Calhoun, both boasting wireless internet signals) was sometimes too difficult between shows. By the time I’d caught up, it was often a day or two later and I had other things to cover, if this blog was to remain timely. (A perfect example: last Friday night I saw Heather Grayson’s Solo Turn production After the Storm, the last in Spoleto’s three-part series. Had much to say about it, but it was over at 10:30 pm, and I had some drinks with friends afterward. The next day, I wrote about three of the events I’d been to on Friday but didn’t get to writing about that one before it was time to see the Japanese dance troupe Miyagi Ryu Nosho Kai at the Gibbes Museum at 2 pm. From there, it was to the Piccolo Finale, and, later, to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the Spoleto Soiree. Which brings us to this point.)

In any event, I’ll spend the rest of this afternoon and probably a good deal of Monday morning putting together my own festival retrospective for next Wednesday’s City Paper. Until then, thanks for reading, and see you at the finale.

So what gives with the weather? I’m getting conflicting accounts of what we can expect for Sunday’s Finale at Middleton Place. Last year we got thoroughly rained out — even the F&B crowd, who were boozing it up right next to the City Paper spread (which was pimp, by the way), eventually threw in a very wet towl and said to hell with it. And you know that crowd doesn’t go down without a hard fight. And even the year before that was damp, if not completely wet. So we really, really deserve a nice day for Sunday’s festivities. We need the Piccolo stage to be dry so that Paul Scheer and Paul McBrayer can get up there and amuse all hell out of us. We need to be able to romance our girlfriends, boyfriends, and spouses with walks around sunny Middleton Place grounds. We need to be able to amble from picnic to picnic greeting friends and sampling food & drink without slogging through a muddy marsh of a Greensward. And we need to be able to hear the Spoleto Festival Orchestra perform its Prokofiev, its Shostakovitch, its Newman, and its, um, Newman unhindered by falling water of any kind. And most of all we need to see those badass fireworks. But weather.com is calling for a high of 85 and isolated thunderstorms, while over at the Post and Courier, Dave Munday says Arlene, the first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season (did I not see this coming?) might bring yet more rain to Charleston late Saturday. Is there an anti-rain dance?!

Hi there. You don’t know me, but I was sitting in a few rows front of you Tuesday night during the opening performance of Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise at Emmett Robinson Theatre. That was some show wasn’t it? Those five people really had the audience under a spell with their stories of living in Apartheid-era South Africa as children, didn’t they? Well, I guess that is until your cellphone began to ring. You remember, don’t you? It was right about when actress Bongeka Mpongwana was recreating a traumatic scene from her childhood when three gang thugs had her pinned to the ground with an automatic pistol shoved down her throat. (Yes, I know – you probably didn’t read the part of the program that explained how these were real stories from the actors’ youths in South Africa, what with worrying about what incredibly important phone calls you might receive during the show.) So when your cellphone started ringing – we could all hear it quite well over the sounds of Mpongwana pleading for her life, about to be raped onstage a few feet away – everyone in the audience all began looking around in disbelief, wondering just what sort of world-class asshole could possibly be so shameless and disrespectful. Congratulations on completely destroying Tuesday night’s opening performance. These five actors traveled with their company from another continent to perform for you. Their stories were about growing up abandoned, eating ants and insects for want of any other food throughout their childhood, suffering rape and torture, the joy of actually having indoor plumbing, watching everyone they know die at the hand of another human being. And here you are, living in the wealthiest nation in history, with everything you could possibly want, and you can’t even be bothered to turn off your cellphone before they tell you their story. Whoever you are, you definitely win the Biggest Jerkoff of Spoleto award this year. Congratulations.

Yes, it’s wet. But at least it’s not as hot as it would be without the rain…

With the big opening weekend of Spoleto Festival USA and Piccolo at our backs and another full week and a half of performances stretching out before us, it’s perhaps possible to try and get a little bit of perspective on the 29th annual arts festival.

One thing we can say for certain: it’s certainly one of the more sexually provocative festivals in recent memory. There are nearly naked midgets and fornication galore on the Dock Street stage for Mabou Mines Dollhouse (not only does it involve dwarves and tall women but solo and, during at least one performance anyway, oral versions), and Don Giovanni is chock full of lascivious behavior, still more skin, and a trunk full of pornography that gets scattered across the floor of Memminger Auditorium. If that’s not enough prurience for festival-goers, they can pop into Belle Muse Gallery on Wentworth Street for a group exhibit of erotic art or check out the work of Lucas Causey at the Humanities Center show Curious Tales – not salacious per se, but there’s no shortage of phalluses, either. Hey, I’m not judging here, just observing.

There may also have been some slight improvement in the cellphone etiquette direction this year. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part; after all, it couldn’t have gotten a hell of a lot worse after last year, and I have yet to experience a single performance in either festival that hasn’t been interrupted by some jerkoff’s twittering, ridiculous ringtone. Actually, I’m mistaken: none of the shows at the American Theater have been interrupted, because the Theatre 99 gang is intelligent enough to make an announcement before each presentation: “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn off all pagers and cellphones, because if they ring during the show they’ll be confiscated and destroyed.” People laugh because they’re expecting comedy from this crowd. But I wanna see tech booth operator and announcement man Sean Sullivan snatch somebody’s ringing cellphone from his fat fingers, hurl it to the ground and stomp on it until it’s been atomized into sand-sized shards of metal and plastic. Please, Sean? Please?

Early reports from opening weekend have two operas out in front of just about everything else in the festival for happy patron quotients. Who’da thunk it? La bella dormente nel bosco is running neck and neck with Don Giovanni as the two most popular parts of the festival to date. Sure, Savion Glover wowed ‘em last weekend at the Gaillard, but that show’s been on the road for months – their Charleston performances apparently closed out a 10-week tour – and he only did three shows. But both Don G. and La bella will play through the end of the festival, and each is a Spoleto-produced premiere. (La bella will also go on to the Lincoln Center Festival, which co-commissioned the work from director Basil Twist, later this summer.)

The Colla Marionette Company’s first program, Sheherazade and Petruschka, has also had theatre-goers gurgling with delight (sometimes literally, being a kid-friendly show), and Mike Daisey’s turn in the Solo Turns series, The Ugly American, has folks hailing it as an especially auspicious beginning to the three-play series.

What would Spoleto be without the edgier stuff? Probably a lot more profitable, but that’s not their mission. And so there’re always a couple of productions in the big festival that make even the most cultured arts diva feel like a floundering Philistine. With opening weekend behind us, that honor at this point is a toss-up: Mabou Mines DollHouse or Emio Greco \ PC’s Rimasto Orfano? They both operate on a level well above mere entertainment, but there have also been plenty of patrons who missed the higher meaning in each. (I even caught a few people I know sneaking out of DollHouse at the first intermission. Sometimes, when you’re faced with three hours of Meaningful Art, a full stomach, and an early morning the next day, it’s damn difficult to rise to the challenge of a production that asks you to work hard to understand it. Hey, we’ve all been there.)

There’s more than a week and a half of the two festivals left, and I’ll be getting to as much of it as I can and talking about all of it here in this space and in the City Paper on June 1 and June 8. I’ll also be getting to a lot more of Piccolo this week, too, so check back often.

Before I leave the opening ceremony altogether, a couple of additional thoughts:
1. The Emio Greco | PC dance performance that closed it out definitely had some people in the audience squirming, not because it was risqué or rude but because it was brazenly unconventional — the music, the choreography, the costumes, it was like nothing most of the attendees had likely seen before. The incongruity of it was striking: oddly progressive dance taking place on a stage surrounded by some of Charleston’s oldest and most historic buildings. It actually seemed like a pretty good metaphor for the Spoleto Festival, which, even though it’s located in historic-minded (some might say “ass backwards”) Charleston, SC, is very pointedly not a conventional, backwards-looking performing arts festival that’s content to mount bang-up productions of dusty classics.

If people are looking for the safe, the cheerily entertaining, and the familiar, they’d be better off looking elsewhere, because that’s not what Spoleto is about. Sure the festival has those things in its program — hey, they gotta pay the bills somehow — but what makes Spoleto special is the wild stuff. This festival doesn’t want to pat your butt and whisper sweet nothings in your ear; Spoleto wants to freak you out.

2. Several people (even one Spoleto administrator) remarked to me that they liked the new location for the opening ceremony even better than the old one in front of City Hall. Gotta say I agree. Wonder what the chances are of that becoming a permanent change?

Were you at the opening ceremony? Lemme hear what you thought of it.