A Long-Awaited Pilgrimage to Spoleto USA in Charleston, SC

Perhaps you don’t know about the Spoleto USA Festival held in Charleston, SC. For nearly 50 years now, every spring, the city of Charleston comes alive for 17 days with more than 100 performing arts programs of all types, from all over the world, held all over the city in theaters and churches. Spoleto was begun by the Italian composer, Gian Carlo Menotti, first in Spoleto, Italy, and then in Charleston, becoming known as the Festival of Two Worlds (or Festival dei Due Mondi). I became familiar with Spoleto in the late 1990s when I sang with a community chorus in Atlanta that was fortunate enough to be invited to perform each year at Piccolo Spoleto, a parallel festival that draws local performers from the Southeast region. At the time, my schedule didn’t allow for any more time than it took to travel to Charleston, sing our concert, and travel home. I longed for the day when I could simply show up in Charleston and enjoy the shows. This year became that time – way back in November, we booked flights and a hotel and waited for the the late January day when Spoleto tickets went on sale.

We were able to score tickets to some of the most popular events in our four days in the city, including Samuel Barber’s seldom-performed opera, Vanessa, a choral concert in which the program began with a piece in which each singer in a 40-person choir sang a separate vocal line (the piece is Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium – it’s basically 16th century experimental music), with each subsequent piece having fewer vocal lines – a madrigal with six vocal lines, a gospel piece with three vocal lines – you get the idea – culminating in the last piece, which was the audience singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in unison. I loved this concert so much that I bought a ticket and went back the next day! We also saw an acrobatics show from a very entertaining Australian group, aptly called “Gravity and Other Myths: Out of Chaos,” and “Only an Octave Apart,” a cabaret style show performed by a trans woman who is a popular cabaret artist from New York, along with an operatic countertenor.

As much as we loved the shows and concerts, we also had a great time exploring museums, enjoying some great restaurants, and just walking around Charleston. We had booked at the Barksdale House, on George Street between King St. and Meeting St. – a perfect location to get pretty much anywhere. And if we got a little tired, there’s a free shuttle bus to give the legs a rest.

We also made our way to a few museums and, along the way saw one of the Art-O-Matic machines I had heard about that seem to be popping up all over the country. Art-O-Matic is a decommissioned cigarette machine that is now used to dispense small artworks. Only $5 for your own little piece of art from a former cigarette machine!

Whatever you’re off to do this summer, happy trails!