Will flag flap silence Spoleto Festival USA?

The steady growth in size and excellence enjoyed by this South Carolina event could be reversed by a legacy of racial distrust.

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 9, 2000

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Spoleto Festival USA is famous for cutting-edge music, theater and dance, and this year's edition has some sensational hits.

Shanghai-born composer Bright Sheng's exquisite musical theater piece, The Silver River, marries Chinese opera, Western classical music and a Broadway-style libretto by David Henry Hwang in seamless, poetic fashion. Then there is an apocalyptic symphony-meets-MTV extravaganza by German composer Heiner Goebbels called Surrogate Cities, which was played by the Spoleto Festival Orchestra in the abandoned, boarded-up Memminger Auditorium to a relentless barrage of computer-driven lighting effects. Another of the highlights is a powerful version of Brecht's anti-capitalist war epic Mother Courage and Her Children by London's Shared Experience Theatre, featuring Kathryn Hunter as the acquisitive, indomitable Mother.

Even Spoleto's misses are fascinating. Psychologically tormented stagings of Verdi's Luisa Miller and Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride confirm Charleston's standing as the home of concept opera in America. Young soprano Sondra Radvanovsky's luminous Luisa is a career-making performance.

But can the Southeast's largest performing arts festival survive the Confederate flag?

Officials of Spoleto would like to think so, now that the South Carolina Legislature has reached a compromise about flying the flag, which to many people is a potent symbol of slavery. On July 1, the Confederate battle flag will be taken down from the statehouse dome in Columbia and hung in a museum. Another Confederate flag will be raised on the Capitol grounds as part of a memorial to Civil War dead.

This compromise, bitterly contested on both sides in a prolonged "hate vs. heritage" debate, was too little, too late to save Spoleto from some wrenching losses that cast an ominous shadow over the festival's future.

A number of artists this year honored the boycott of South Carolina's tourist industry by the NAACP and canceled their performances, leaving holes in the schedule that couldn't be filled. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, jazz singer Dianne Reeves and the experimental musical theater production Running Man all pulled out of the 17-day festival, which continues through Sunday.

Piccolo Spoleto, the sprawling alternative festival that features performers and visual artists from around the South, also lost important attractions to the flag flap.

To compound Spoleto's problems this year, Antoine Rigot, a leading tightrope performer in the French circus troupe Les Colporteurs, suffered a severe spinal injury in a swimming accident. The circus had to cancel 10 of its 14 scheduled performances of Filao, a theatrical work on tightropes and trapezes in the live oak trees of a Charleston park.

"This festival has been a very difficult one," general director Nigel Redden said. "In February, ticket sales were 16.7 percent ahead of last year. Then after Bill T. Jones announced he was canceling, we went into a bit of a fall and ticket sales declined."

Redden figures final ticket sales will be off about 10 percent from last year's record-setting total. Group sales were down 45 percent, the general director told a luncheon gathering of the Music Critics Association of North America, of which I am a member.

MCANA, with about 50 newspaper critics, musicologists and other writers in attendance -- all of us white -- went ahead with its long-planned annual meeting at Spoleto despite the NAACP boycott.

"The festival is a victim of the situation as much as anyone," said MCANA president Robert Croan, recently retired music critic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "It would have been difficult and not appropriate for us to make changes."

The executive committee of the festival's board of directors had released a statement calling for the flag to be removed from the Capitol.

Next year is Spoleto's 25th anniversary, and Redden said its tone "clearly will be celebratory," invoking the roll call of great musicians who have been closely associated with the festival, including Yo-Yo Ma, Renee Fleming, Gil Shaham, Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell and Jennifer Larmore.

Redden said he hoped the Confederate flag compromise and the establishment of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in South Carolina -- the last state in the country to honor the civil rights hero -- marked a turning point.

"The feeling in Charleston is that the issue is resolved," he said. "Finally, there is a Martin Luther King holiday. Finally the flag is coming down. These are significant steps in a part of the country where there are many fingers to be pointed."

Nevertheless, the racial politics have to be unsettling for the festival, whose artistic leadership is all white. Only three of the state's 26 black legislators voted in favor of the flag compromise. The NAACP may not be the moral force it once was, but the organization has seen success with its call for a boycott of South Carolina tourism.

If the state doesn't come up with a response that breaks the rhetorical deadlock, the boycott could expand and artists and festivalgoers will have no choice but to think hard about passing up Spoleto. As much as 60 percent of those attending are from outside South Carolina.

Artists in the festival have not shied away from confronting racial issues over the years. In 1991, an exhibition of site-specific art works, Places of the Past, upset the Charleston establishment with its exploration of slavery.

This year, Spoleto sponsored a free concert and other events in an effort to address the flag controversy, pulling them together just before the festival began. One was held Saturday night when several hundred people crammed into a small downtown theater for Beyond the Flag: Southern Writers Speak, a gathering organized by novelist Josephine Humphreys. It drew an impressive array of literary luminaries, white and black, including novelist Allan Gurganus, journalist Blanche McCrary Boyd, historian Charles Joyner and poet Sharan Strange.

Edward Ball, who won the National Book Award for his investigation into his ancestors' extensive slave business in South Carolina, Slaves in the Family, gave the most provocative speech. He likened Middleton Place, the plantation outside Charleston famous for its ornamental gardens, to the Nazi concentration camp, Dachau. Middleton Place had 800 slaves.

"There are no markers for the whipping posts, for the hanging trees at Middleton Place," Ball said. "Let us try to come to terms with the slave experience by commemorating it, not forgetting it. The path beyond the flag is the one that leads through the thicket and the swamp of our national act of forgetting."

The words of Ball and other writers packed a punch. However, in a strange sort of way, the Confederate flag controversy was best illuminated by a festival production that, at first glance, couldn't seem less relevant to the situation.

It was Gluck's 18th century French opera Iphigenie en Tauride, performed in the intimate Dock Street Theatre. Based on the plays of Euripides and set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, the opera tells of the Greek priestess Iphigenie, who has been given refuge in the temple of the goddess Diana. As a sacrifice to the gods, Iphigenie is almost forced to execute her brother, Oreste.

In the stark, angst-ridden staging of directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, the opera communicated a powerful sense of individuals who were trapped, and not just by the monolithic gray walls of the set that confined the plaintive drama to geometric patterns on the stage.

Soprano Andrea Trebnik's Iphigenie, in a penetrating, well-focused performance, and baritone Andrew Schroeder's rich-voiced Oreste portrayed characters not fully in charge of their actions. Instead, they were trapped by the customs of their culture, by their gods, by their tragic fate -- not unlike the way present-day South Carolinians are trapped by their history.

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