A Spoleto we must not forget
Repost of Maura's festival wrap up in Charleston City Paper
Director Rodula Gaitanou’s production of The Turn of The Screw was a world premiere at Spoleto Festival 2025 | Mike Ledford
If truth has become an increasingly slippery thing to grasp in recent times, memory can be just as elusive. This year’s Spoleto Festival USA brought that notion home across disciplines.
In my own life, Spoleto Festival USA, and Piccolo Spoleto, too, have held a particularly potent agency.
That started with its 1977 launch, when I was tapped to sing in a children’s chorus in the first act of Spoleto’s production of The Queen of Spades, which involved performing along with the Westminster Choir.
Since then, the annual arts infusion has marked each year of my growth like the rings on a tree, in ways both small and more profound. I simply would not be the person I am today had Spoleto not come to town to so extravagantly broaden my worldview.
That happened as often on the sidewalks as the stages. As teenagers, my friends and I would head to the city market, perching in the former square nearby to rubberneck at the thus-dubbed Spoletians. These Bohemian creatures swanned into a profoundly preppy town with all their flair and finery to show us a thing or two about self-expression.
While at the College of Charleston, I’d talk my way into the Garden and Gun Club, the famously freewheeling, disco-powered social experiment of a private watering hole. First started by a Spoleto staffer, it was singular in the South, gathering everyone from drag queens to Broad Street lawyers to bend elbows and live and let live.
There was, naturally, all that high-caliber art from the across the world literally out my front door: an entree into apartheid via playwright Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca at the Dock Street Theatre; a sneak peek through the Cistern Yard gates to hear Ella Fitzgerald; the high-voltage jolt of Phe Zulu Theatre Company; an intimate private concert at a neighbor’s Legare Street home by the then tween Joshua Bell; the eye opener that was Ken Russell’s logo-addled take on Madama Butterfly.
Spoleto this year
Throughout a fine, effusive 2025 Spoleto Festival USA, artists from places near and far circled around the act of remembering. In striking convergence of word, song and image, they demonstrated that, time after time, truth will bear out. It may span years or in some instances even astral planes, but sooner or later, the missing fact or indisputable action lands sufficiently to change perception.
In the transfixing, two-way mirror that was director Rodula Gaitanou’s world premiere production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, the truth came haunting, as ghosts lured innocents from their waking world. In the stunningly executed White Box, which was created and directed by Stockholm-based Sabine Theunissen, the final days of decades-ago disappeared trio of Swedish adventures were revealed in a trove of revelatory photos.
Chicago-based Manual Cinema availed of vintage-looking silhouette puppets to reenvision Macbeth, with memory in mind. The 4th Witch tolds the story of a girl whose World War I memories of her parents’ death has entrapped her in a thrall of grief and rage, with three witches from the Scottish play enabling her to transcend memory and restore order in her life and land.
There was a probe into the nature of truth itself, and its crucial role in collective memory. This was made manifest in the deeply affecting Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, based verbatim on recollections of a former government courier in Poland. In the play, actor David Strathairn recounts wartime atrocities that Karski witnessed during the Holocaust in Poland, probing for a rapt audience the limits of truth when mankind is unwilling to believe.
Kronos Quartet, whose foursome includes Spoleto’s chamber music series director, composer and cellist Paul Wiancko, also mined source material, creating compositions around recordings concerning race in America. An interview between Mahalia Jackson and Studs Terkel shared an intimate exchange on her utter pain in witnessing her treatment off the stage; the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” was given new sonic urgency.
The quartet also brought it home with Mende Funeral Suite, a Spoleto-commissioned work from Charleston’s Charlton Singleton featuring guest percussionist Quentin Baxter, breathing joyous new life into recordings of Sea Island songs.
At TD Arena, Baxter joined renowned composer and trumpeter Etienne Charles. In “Gullah Roots,” a jazz ensemble gave global context to Lowcountry sounds. As he neared the end, the composer and renowned trumpeter gave pause to recall, in the harrowing “Weeping Time,” the largest known domestic slave auction of 603 individuals, sold and separated from their families in 1835 in Charleston.
Charleston was again represented, by way of the locally based Band of Horses. The oak-blanketed Cistern Yard had once been stomping grounds of the band’s lead singer, College of Charleston alumnus Ben Bridwell. Gazing over the audience, he gave thanks to the festival for bringing such artistry from around the world to our city.
On a similarly heaven-sent evening in Cistern Yard, and in an earlier surprise pop-up concert at Second Presbyterian Church, the legendary Patti Smith inhabited each space with soulful recollections and song, often involving artists like photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and poet Allen Ginsberg, whose presence and departure from her life have left their mark.
While marveling in the life of an artist, she hewed to her punk roots and rallied us all, reminding an attentive crowd that people have the power. Such communal agency was evidenced also by way of dance, by way of Limon Dance Company’s Join, in which 11 dancers supported one another in ways that emphasized both their individual weight and communal strength.
In these turbulent times, with troops deployed at protests, Smith’s rallying cry can be easy to forget. But with the successive, startling reflections on truth and memory mined by so many of artists at this year’s excellent, energizing festival, together we will all remember.