From the Chair of the Board

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.

This non-list would also have to include Athol Fugard performing in his Road to Mecca, Renee Fleming’s first performance at the Festival in Platee, and then her extraordinary performance as the Countess in Nozze di Figaro. I’d have to include Allen Ginsberg reading his poem during Hydrogen Jukebox. And I certainly could not forget the elation that I and everyone involved felt when we read the New York Times review that described the 1991 exhibition, Places with a Past, as “the most moving and original exhibition in the United States this season.”

Then there are the moments that reveal the beautiful melding of nations and cultures that occur during an international arts festival. I would point first to the series of works by Chinese and Chinese-American artists: Silver River, Paradise Interrupted, Feng Yi Ting, and, of course, the eighteen-and-a-half-hour opera, The Peony Pavilion. There was the after party when General William Westmoreland invited the ensemble of Vietnamese dancers—all from Hanoi—to his house after the deeply moving performance of Ea Sola’s work. I think of the audience dancing in the street after the Bale Folklorico di Bahia performance. And how could I omit Shen Wei’s mesmerizing choreography or Rezo Gariadze’s devastating retelling of the Battle of Stalingrad using two puppet horses made from tin cans and string? Adding to this list are the productions from Ireland’s Gate Theatre, beginning with the amazing Salome in 1990, plus Emma Rice’s work, starting with the poignant Tristan and Yseult. Oh, there’s Don Giovanni and the Orchestra playing Surrogate Cities—and I haven’t even mentioned the chamber music performances, which I attend religiously each Festival. Refreshing and intriguing, these concerts are, without question, the best way to begin each day.

I could go on and on. I suppose what I’m getting at is that the absolute best part of the Festival is the way performance follows performance. The way dance follows opera, follows chamber music, follows theater, and so on—and how my impression of one is influenced by what I have just seen or what I am about to see. This is what I love most about Spoleto Festival USA. And while my time behind-the-scenes is coming to an end, I look forward to the many more performances left to take in as I join you in the audience.