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FROM THE GENERAL DIRECTOR Nigel Redden
Since I announced my retirement almost a year ago, I have been asked repeatedly to list the performances that I remember most fondly from the soon-to-be 52 years since I first started working for the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and subsequently, my 35 years, give or take, at Spoleto Festival USA. I have continuously sidestepped the question; I have so many favorites that none can really be “favorites.” Choosing among the thousands of performances held at the festivals since my introduction to them is impossible. Yet for my final letter in this program book, I have decided to travel back in time and recount the numerous performances and experiences through my festival history that would top a list of favorites—if such a thing could exist. I might begin with the first opera I saw at Spoleto, Italy, in 1969: L’Italiana in Algeri, when Patrice Chereau, who was something of an enfant terrible in the opera world, thumbed his nose at Gian Carlo Menotti, the founder of the Festival dei Due Mondi. This delight in the radical would also include a work from my first visit to Charleston in 1983, when I watched Ken Russell’s direction of Madama Butterfly. The production ended with a nuclear explosion and the transformation of Japan into something resembling the United States in the 1950s, complete with six-foot-high ketchup bottles and giant hamburgers. Then during my first year as general manager in 1986, I remember the beauty of Stravinsky’s Le Renard, for which David Gordon directed and Beni Montresor designed a production with huge helium-filled puppets of the fox, the cat, the goat, and the cock floating over the dancers on the Dock Street Theatre stage. I would also mention here the 16-foot-high ant—yes, a 16-foot-high ant—that circled the College of Charleston Cistern Yard in Lee Breuer’s The Warrior Ant. The Warrior Ant, Spoleto Festival USA, 1988
