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Spoleto: A Gem of a Festival
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16627 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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10 / 1989 |
1,394 Words |
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Maya Wallach
Maya Wallach is a dance writer, critic, and photographer
currently based in Los Angeles |
It has been more than three decades since Gian Carlo Menotti transformed the hilltop village of Spoleto, Italy, into the site of the Festival dei due Mondi. Spoleto becomes a world unto itself every summer when musicians, dancers, actors, directors, choreographers, and composers from all lover the globe come together for seventeen days, performing classics as well as innovative new works.
In 1976 the Festival of Two Worlds gained new meaning when Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA, an annual sister festival held in Charleston, South Carolina in the late spring. Like its Italian counterpart, the American festival offers more than one hundred performances of nearly two dozen productions. If that were not enough, Charleston's Office of Cultural Affairs sponsors a parallel festival, Piccolo Spoleto, which presented an additional seven hundred events this past spring.
From May 26 through June 11, all of Charleston turned into one giant stage as the Boston Ballet, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company, Laurie Anderson, ISO, and Cyrano! discovered Spoleto Festival USA.
Civic Pride
Southern matrons sighed with pleasure as the curtain rose on the Boston Ballet in pristine formation, ready to perform for George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco and Fernando Bujones' restaging of Marius Petipa's Raymonda. The bright enthusiasm onstage matched the audience's civic pride at having successfully lured a big-city ballet company to South Carolina. The audience forgot about classical purity not being Boston's forte as the likes of Maurice Bejart's Le Sacre de
... (1993 of 8770 Characters)
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