Table of Contents     Chapter 1     Chapter 2     Chapter 3     Chapter 4     Chapter 5     Chapter 6     Bibliography   After Thoughts--Summer 2485

Chapter 2

Place

Picture Charleston's or Chattanooga's downtown area empty of all but its buildings and streets and lights and air.  Notice the greenery, the buildings, the condition of the roads, the clothes hanging in shop windows?  Those subtle signs are embedding themselves in, and affecting, your thoughts.  Most festivals apparently come to life out of such empty spaces, whether an older downtown area of a small southern or Italian city or a deserted air base, such as Griffiss AFB in Rome, New York where Woodstock '99 was held in huge hangers and over acres of runways bounded by miles of fencing. The cues, or context, picked up about the place influence how the festival evolves.  As such, place is a primary element as a festival is dreamed of, planned for, carried through, enjoyed or discontinued.

Upper left: Crowded camping for 250,000 at Woodstock Festival 1999; upper right: Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival, looking across the Tennessee River toward the barge stage in front of the lighted angular roofline of the Tennessee Aquarium; lower left, peaceful Chautauqua scene; lower right, Spoleto USA's final outdoor concert at Middleton Place Plantation outside Charleston.

This chapter will take a close look at the place, especially the emptiness of the place before the creation of a festival, for two town festivals as primary examples.  The British dramatist Peter Brook provided a guiding principal about the function of space in the physical environment of festivals in Charleston and Chattanooga, which can be seen as unique forms of theater:

Why Charleston?

Even while considering place, force and ideal as concurrent and inseparable functions of festival, it is understandable to ask, "but which element comes first in the sequence of origin?" For Spoleto, it appears the dominant element in its creation myth was its place. Even so, some uncertainty about who did what when, where, why, and how exists in the story of Spoleto coming to Charleston. However, underlying these disputed facts is the unquestioned dramatic reality that this traditional South Carolina city and its improbable avant-garde arts festival have been engaged in a special, intricate relationship since Menotti first saw it in 1976 and decided to look no further on the list prepared for him of other Southern cities. 

Redden suggested one important difference in Menotti's festivals by focusing on the central artistic idea behind the festival:  "I think what distinguishes this festival from other festivals, or rather from some other festivals that were started by cities, is that it started with an artistic idea rather than a cultural development idea or even with a place idea. It was very much about artists and it happened to be Charleston rather than, "Let's take Charleston and try to figure out what we can do to make something exciting happen in Charleston."   

This viewpoint would suggest that the idea preceded the place but all those interviewed agreed that Charleston's special character as a theater itself prompted Menotti to stage his Spoleto, Italy festival idea in this special urban environment.  It is clear enough that Charlestonians did not decide to have a festival and find an artistic director and staff to produce it. Menotti had constructed a utopian community in Spoleto, Italy, where the artist ruled for a few summer weeks, an inversion in this larger sense with aspects of a Bakhtinian carnival reversal of official/unofficial. 

Menotti needed a special city for an American production of his artistic utopia. From his statements in the various Spoleto brochures and the recollections of those involved in the American festival, the signs point toward a more complex relationship than that "it happened to be Charleston." The city's particular character was very important, as Redden explained:

"I think one of the other very key things about the city is that it happens to be architecturally beautiful; that is, that this is a place that is an appropriate setting for a festival that celebrates those areas of human imagination that are concerned with beauty and with some of the intangibles of the human spirit. That is why it was started here [emphasis mine].

The peninsula of Charleston was a city of American cultural firsts: first opera, first ballet, first play performed. The festival's first general manager, Christine L. Reed, wrote in the first 1977 program: "There is abundant reason for the appropriateness of Charleston, South Carolina, as the site of Spoleto Festival U.S.A.--its pride in sustaining its own rich aesthetic heritage of architectural and botanical treasures, its long-time concern for the educational process (the College of Charleston is the oldest municipal college in the United States), the establishment of a repository of its life style (the Museum of Charleston is the oldest museum in the United States), the forming of the St. Cecelia society in 1762 as an outlet for the musically inclined, the first theatre in America built exclusively for theatrical purposes (the Dock Street Theater), and the first opera in this country ("Flora") was performed in Charleston in 1735."

It was an old world city in the new world. It was a narrow peninsula on the Atlantic seacoast. Like Spoleto, Italy, it had been left out of much of the South's industrialization. Its downtown had been preserved in a state resembling the original eighteenth-century seaport town. Destroyed as a viable urban center by the Civil War, it no longer was a city of firsts of any kind nationally or regionally. Its civic leaders admitted its economy was stagnant, dominated by the huge U.S. Navy base.

It was, in short, an urban "empty space" waiting for a Menotti to call it a "bare stage," to fill it with performers, and to invite an audience to observe--much as he had done as a child growing up in Italy. [John Gruen, Menotti (New York: Macmillan, 1978).] Other Southern festival possibilities, such as Winston-Salem, had some of the qualities he sought for his festival music-theater. Yet none except Charleston had the look and feel of the old European town in the "uncivilized" American South, the juxtaposition of old world and new world architecture. Even a Chattanooga, if it had made the initial list, would have had more pure dramatic scenery with its "mountains looking at each other" at the river's entrance from the Tennessee River canyon. But it lacked the dramatic, contrasting of the old: Charleston's European town houses, empty theaters, narrow streets, and setting on a small ocean point.

Dock Street Theater, Charleston, SC

Charleston worked perfectly as a large-scale thrust stage.  It captured its creator, actors, and audiences for a magical seventeen days in late spring--"cruise ship magic," as Redden remembered from his youth at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. From the discussion of Menotti's purposes that follow, it becomes evident that the festival idea depended on the nature of a place as much as it depended on what Redden termed an artistic idea. It seems that, in Redden's sense, Menotti's Charleston festival originated as an intricate, intertwined artistic idea, place idea, and cultural development idea. The complexity of this interplay is illustrated by comments of Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. in the opening of his official welcoming statement to the 1978 second festival program:

In 1941, Charleston's noted artist and author, Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, wrote, in Mellowed by Time, that Charleston "is the one colonial city in America with a living record which tells us, more vividly than all the books and all the old prints in museums can ever tell, what the New World inherited from the civilization of the ages. We started again, not to destroy the old law, but to fulfill it.  Here the land is speaking--put your ear to the ground and listen.  Here, more so than any other colonial city, we live amidst a living record of the New World's inheritance from the old world. Our architecture, our townscape, our art, which form the setting and backdrop of the Spoleto Festival, are themselves a 'festival of two worlds.'" [Joseph P., Riley, Jr., Mayor of Charleston, Statement in 1978 official Spoleto Festival U.S.A. program guide, 12.]

Riley's and Verner's aesthetic response to a theatrical location was not a new idea invented by Charleston's publicity agents. Salzburg evoked a similar reaction. "Every square, every street here seems to have been expressly created as the setting for a play," wrote the festival's founder and artistic director, Max Reinhardt. [Max Reinhardt, "Austria Today," (1979).] The theatrical city spaces described by Reinhardt were strongly felt by Menotti when he saw Charleston. There is little disagreement that Charleston, to Menotti the impresario, had the theatrical form of a Salzburg and appeared one of those special works of urban theatrical form suitable for his vision of a special place for artists and audiences.

The 1986 and 1988 interviews brought out the importance of Charleston's beckoning theatrical space. An excerpt from Stern's recollections in 1988 particularly demonstrates a pre-existing desire to have any proposed festival match the city's beauty:

I think the fact that Charleston itself is so unique, that I wanted to see a festival here to match it, not just another festival. And this could contribute to the well-being of our community....I think it can be an educational and a cultural center....To make this thing an artistic success, a social success, and a financial success, certain elements were essential. And Charleston fitted in beautifully.... Charleston was the cultural center of colonial times. And we are just returning it to its former peak condition.

Cathedral of St. Luke and St. Paul, Charleston, SC

It was the Charlestonians' pride of "place," repeatedly expressed both from those dedicated to bringing in Menotti's festival and those equally dedicated to preventing it, that arouses more than superficial interest in the physical environment that excited Menotti and the many contributors to his dream of a chimerical summer village for artists and art lovers. Could his Italian creation take root in an American location? One answer to the question of "Why Charleston?" is found in Stern's understanding of Menotti's reasons for selecting the isolated Italian village of Spoleto, which followed the maestro's idea of finding a place suitable for presenting young American artists to European audiences:

From that point on [before 1958] he had to find a place to have this festival. It wasn't the cities, because, he says, and he said this is true of Charleston as well, that the city must be an art form in itself, that people should walk around the city as well as enjoy the festival and they tie in together; they're in concert and in harmony [emphasis mine]. He chose a small town in Umbrian Province, Spoleto, which historians tell us was where Hannibal crossed the Alps and the big battle was at Spoleto. Here is an old, old town that was bypassed by the twentieth century. It has its original Etruscan walls, original forum, theaters, opera houses. It was the seat of culture of the Umbrian Province. It was destitute, economically completely depressed; people were leaving; there was no industry. The culture which could be presented was nonexistent. So he selected this really depressed area, yes [replying to a question], like a theater that had been empty for many years.

After nearly 20 years of artistic success with the town arts festival in Spoleto, which became a prospering village, Menotti and American cultural leaders decided that a similar effort should be attempted in this country. Although the official story of federal sponsorship of Spoleto Festival U.S.A. is undocumented, the basic reasons given by Stern focus on the need for an appropriate home for the festival:

The United States National Endowment of the Arts in Washington approached Menotti...and suggested that he establish a Spoleto Festival in the United States...Menotti was placed in charge of trying to develop a plan to present the festival in the United States. The general feeling of the bureaucracy in Washington was that no festival existed in the Southeastern United States, and that this festival should be in the Southeastern part of the United States. Menotti was asked to select a city where this festival could find a home...[emphasis mine].

He decided to come to Charleston first, and I remember that visit extremely well. It was before the Italian festival in 1975, because Frances [Edmunds] knew they were going to come here when she went over there. And I think first of all Menotti said, "I fell in love with it at first sight." He said, "Charleston is an artistic form in itself, and that is what I would like." But he was further impressed with, number one, the College [of Charleston] because if we could have the festival prior to the Italian festival we would need dormitory space for over 600 artists and technicians....

Without the College, there would have been no festival, because of the housing situation and the logistic support. Menotti loved the idea of the College, he thought the festival should be near an educational institution, he loved the idea of the historic part of Charleston, and he loved the idea that the Mayor was so enthusiastic and the community for which he spoke... [emphasis mine].

Garden Place Theater, Charleston, SC

It is in the context of "finding a home" place that the full transcript of Stern's story of origin, which reflects his privileged perspective on Menotti's choice of Charleston and on the events of the festival's origin, becomes the central narrative connecting the three primary categories of this analysis, where the combining of the three elements of place, idea, and force find their material expression in the city's physical reality.

It is a story more complex than what might have been the origin of a festival of place: "Let's take Charleston and try to figure out what we can do to make something exciting happen in Charleston." It is an account of the combining of the three elements, where no one causal factor, such as place, can be isolated completely from others. The story as told by Stern has all the public drama of his wife's description of waiting for the black or white smoke to signal the election of a new Pope. His narration of how he and Charleston's new mayor overcame one influential town leader's sincere effort to stop the festival, following a visit to the Italian production, is the key to understanding the necessity for an ideological "empty space" to combine with physical "empty spaces":

In 1976, Hugh Lane, Nella Barkley, and Mr. and Mrs. Tom Stevenson went to Spoleto to see really what it was all about. A matter of record is that when Hugh Lane returned to Charleston, he said he would have nothing more to do with it. He did not want to expose the citizens of Charleston to people dancing without clothes and felt that the people who would come to Charleston would be depraved, queers--I think he used those words--and he offered to return all the money that people had donated to this effort. And he did. I think he returned something like a hundred thousand dollars to people because he had misled them.

In addition, Hugh Lane said that the festival was not economically feasible and would never be a success. This is part of a letter that he put in writing, which he subsequently has regretted but not denied. He was chairman of the board of the C&S bank. But he was the head of everything here, head of the United Way. You know, he was number one citizen, and he went all over the state to generate these contributions. He does speak to me now, but he'll never admit the festival has done any good.

Mayor Joseph Riley and Stern combined their personal influence and the resources of municipal government and the College of Charleston to overcome powerful private resistance that ordinarily would have stopped at once any such major civic initiative:

...Hugh Lane reiterated his position that he was not going to subject Charlestonians to be a breeding place for undesirables. Now this withdrawal by Nella and Hugh Lane would have been catastrophic had not the Mayor called Menotti and other members of the board of the Festival Foundation and asked them to meet in Charleston.

I recall the meeting extremely well because it was held in the President's house at the College of Charleston in September of 1976. The Mayor had asked if it could be held in the President's house at the College. At that meeting, which was a very vitriolic meeting, in which Mr. Lane walked out with Mrs. Barkley, the Mayor stated that he was convinced that the Spoleto Festival would do a great deal for Charleston, that he disagreed but appreciated the views of the dissidents. He turned to me and he said, "Will you take over?" I said I would never say no to him and I've never turned down a challenge....

The basic question was, "Will there be a festival in Charleston?" And I must say, it was the unanimous view of both the members of the Festival Foundation board and the few Charlestonians who were there that we should have it, and that we should have it next year in 1977. That gave us nine months to prepare for it....I don't know what the records will show. If you ask me, and I leave myself out of it, the responsibility for initially setting up Spoleto fell on the Mayor and the College, on both of our willingnesses to never say never and it couldn't be done.

Middleton Place, Charleston, SC

Repeatedly, the powerful gravitational field of the physical city itself surfaced in this, in other interviews, in program statements, and in press reports. The determination of Mayor Riley to bring the world of high performing arts to his town against the explicit wishes of a powerful business leader, the combination of city and college resources, the ambience available to Menotti at the city's coastal resorts, the fact of the college's availability at the right time with a generous president willing to do far more than his share, wealthy donors who shared the dream with Menotti, the international Spoleto festival board's willingness to come to Charleston for dialogue with festival supporters, the facilitating role of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Walter Anderson's personal encouragement--all reflect an extraordinary response to absence. It is a response much like Brook's view of the seductive empty space that he has only to call a bare stage to begin the making of theater. That all these elements, not any one of them, happened to combine at the same time was the key that unlocked the magical space and produced Menotti's new theater in America.  

The Struggle to Fill the Chattanooga's Empty Festival Space

Ross's Landing, Chattanooga, TN

In asking the same question, "which element caused the festival to be born?" about a town festival in Chattanooga, the emphasis of the basic element is different than for Charleston. However, an empty stage existed in Chattanooga as well. As seen in the description of place in the original Chattanooga festival proposal of May 5, 1981, the focus is more on the community's reaction to its space than on a physical description of the space itself.

[Empty Space]: One of Chattanooga's principal problems is its sociality. Unlike the citizens of many other picturesque cities, Chattanoogans begin a mass exodus from downtown at 3:30 every afternoon. By 6 p.m. the center of the city is virtually deserted. Why? Because very little is happening of interest. The resulting loss of retail and tax dollars is considerable. But beyond the loss in dollars is a loss in community spirit and pride and the loss of a cohesive urban life style and shared interest. By one definition a city is a focus of shared interests and common concerns. A deserted city center is a tangible sign of a citizenry alienated from its city. In short, the potential inherent in Chattanooga's new physical improvements may never take hold if the city remains a social desert. Some have described the Chattanooga community as divided, dispirited, and lacking in broadbased social vitality. We think there is some truth to this view. A key missing ingredient is a set of community activities which physically pull people of different stations in life together....(author's Riverbend materials)

Various persons in Chattanooga were struggling to fill the city's empty urban spaces with a festival in the early 1980s. Several concerned citizens observed that something was missing in the city; others sensed the empty space and were working at their own versions of what to put in this felt absence, or bare stage. 

Just as Charleston and Spoleto, Italy, were economically depressed and had been apparently empty or little used in relation to past periods, so this ideological, political, aesthetic, social, and even physical space in Chattanooga was unfilled, analogous to an empty file folder with nothing in it but a heading whose reality was at that period no more than the category itself.

Awareness of this empty space, which of course was not completely empty, began with memory of remarks that I, as the city's public affairs director, wrote for the mayor's welcoming comments at the last Downtown Arts Festival in 1972. He had stressed the vitality that the arts bring to the city and, an always present theme, called attention to the unusual scenic beauty of mountains, river, and lakes that Chattanoogans should strive to "live up to" and match in our imaginative human works.

The sequence of influences, the process of opening a new definition of festival, and the larger context of the sources that influenced this one city's creation of a festival are revealed in part by much earlier efforts. From 1898 into the early 1900s, Chattanooga hosted an annual week-long May festival with concerts, parades, bicycle races, flower shows, citizens in carnival dress, and king and queen coronations. These were major events involving towns around the city. A midway carnival occupied downtown city streets. Regional events celebrated the Norwegian god Balfur's arrival in "Spring--the Festival of Nature," a provocative hint of nature's statement of a "festival of differences" when the plant kingdom is in full blossom and in full embrace and exchange of differences.

These festivals had several commonalities with the creation, purposes, and programming of the current Riverbend Festival, but it appears the only surviving element is the August debutante presentation, the Cottonball Gala. These festivals were unknown to all local Riverbend organizers until March 1988. Then, when several of us read copies of the Chattanooga News-Free Press articles that I had found at the public library, we were struck by the similarity of having had at that time a local man pick up from uncertain sources the idea of having a major town festival for many of the same reasons we had chosen in 1981. It would be interesting to know whether history repeated itself. But "empty space" theory predicts that the scenic mountain town would inspire imaginative dreaming of cultural artifacts to match those of its natural context.

In 1935, the second National Folk Festival was held in Chattanooga. This spring event was part of a national resurgence in gathering and performing authentic folk ballads and in restoring the "purity" of the "folk," mainly "white folk." In a study of the racist "White Top Folk Festival" of the 1930s in Virginia, Chattanooga's hosting of this event drew comment for its inclusion of black singers:

Sarah Gertrude Knott, who founded the National Folk Festival in 1934, presented a broad range of performers, including black, who shared the stage with whites. "[The] picture of our folk life today would not be complete," she said, "without the contributions of the Negro." At her second annual festival in 1935, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee--surely as race-conscious an area as south Virginia--Knott's mountain fiddlers and ballad singers shared the program with a thousand-voice black chorus singing spirituals."[David E. Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: the Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 1983, 244].

The intentionally racist purposes of "White Top" merit comparison with similar German ideologies of the 1930s. White Top reflects an extreme example of racially exclusive programming and admission to the "white" top of the mountain. However, the image of a thousand-voice black chorus evokes the "sing" festival, "Southern Voices," proposed during the 1981 planning seminars by Doris Hays.

During the 1950s and early 70s, the city's Allied Arts Council sponsored an annual spring or fall weekend arts festival with primarily outside performing and visual arts. The last downtown spring arts festival held in 1972. According to a conversation with the festival's chairperson, Kathy Patten, the downtown retail merchants complained so much about the loss of business during the festival that it was discontinued. All the parking spaces were filled, the merchants complained.

The festival itself was primarily visual arts, including crafts, juried paintings, pottery, and a small amount of performing arts. A few clowns amused the crowd; dancers had a brief presentation, and the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra played. After that, for nearly a decade no central arts festival of any kind enlivened downtown Chattanooga.

Since then, several community groups responded to the absence of a town festival. One effort was a 1978 Allied Arts Fund document, indicating the prevailing "fund-raising" festival idea, although the project was never realized. Another was the Riverbend organizing group's response in 1980 to information brought from Spoleto Festival U.S.A. and the Salzburg Festival, which indicated a growing curiosity about the general effects of town festivals. A third was the Lyndhurst Foundation's interest in community development strategies, such as a City Fair, and the foundation's 1981 "Five Nights in Chattanooga" summer concerts, which some have thought was the first Riverbend Festival. Finally, a reaction of the business community to some missing ingredient in civic life was the Chamber of Commerce's 1981 renewal of a small downtown arts festival.

Eventually, the collective group process of bounding the empty space was a formal plan submitted in November 1981 to the Lyndhurst Foundation for administrative funding. 

For most who were involved in the festival's founding events, this was the key document that synthesized and defined the empty space of the festival theater. With the new festival group's proposed staffing and volunteer plan, budget, and action timetable, the first phase of the process of creating, or defining and bounding, the empty festival space, the unfilled theatrical space, was completed. These first documents were in effect a series of scripts and revisions for the social drama that would become the Riverbend Festival. Here is one committee member's suggestion for something new in Chattanooga, which was her home before leaving for college music studies:

...A Festival is a creature which needs to fit its habitat. And, since it is a creature we make, I think of what kind of creature will be nurtured by the locals--be supported by citizens and in return, full grown, give pleasure to those who make and support it. My creature Festival then, is one which has characteristics of the local scene. It sings. And how! This Festival, then, should always have a chance to sing! Hymn sings, sacred harp sings, blues sings, country music sings, gospel sings, massed chorus sings, special avant garde performance events sings (my kind of singing), orchestra-chorus sings. One of the first and strongest reasons to call this festival "Southern Voices."

...This festival-creature goes to all parts of the city as I see it--to insurance companies and factories, to the courthouse lawn, to the river bridge, to the mountain parks, to the university campus, to the senior citizen center, and sings, too, with the people where they are. The creature not only sings, of course, it dances and rhymes and paints pretty pictures and makes marvelous, outlandish sculptures and reads outrageously wonderful poems. This festival is of the city and of the region, not laid on it from the outside. It has the accent of many voices of the region. It's not an adopted creature, but one born of the existing cultural institutions: a fifty-year-old orchestra, a vital opera company, and tons of singers, lots of fiddlers, and more composers, writers, performers of all kinds than the majority of the population would know except for the festival celebrating their existence.

...Star performers come and go. They are naturally a part of this festival but the underpinning for that which is already there needs spotlight, aid, support, and moral uplift. Past and present, the existing, and that new to be added to it, all are part of this creature. The past in the form of a living mountain tradition, such as sacred harp and fiddling. The present in the form of commissioned art works.

As this renowned New York City composer and pianist, Sorrel Hays, had pointed out in her proposal, "A festival is a creature which needs to fit its habitat."   However, the planning committee felt this was not the direction needed at this time in the city's economic life and the ideas did not win support.  

The new "festival creature" responded to its habitat, its "empty space," strongly enough to be repeated; and it has become community ritual. If it had not been repeated, if it had become an occasional pageant, it would have been no more than a one-time theatrical production, such as "Five Nights in Chattanooga," which some believe was the first Riverbend festival.  That the festival became ritual suggests it met a continuing need to infuse a temporary empty civic space with its energy. Yet what became the Riverbend Festival seems to have been a "masked" theatrical structure, a masque with social intent, one resembling the popular festive-form "absent clearly established footlights," in Bakhtin's sense. Apparently if the intent is to have a repetitive, nonpermanent temporal and spatial structure, often it is called a festival, possibly because of a message those in control desire to be transmitted or reinforced. This interpretation, using most of the key sources from that period (excepting the foundation documents, which were not requested for this exploratory analysis), reinforces the interdependence of place, ideal, and force in creating the nature, functions, and meaning of a festival.

From the theoretical perspective of an empty theatrical space, it appears in the May 5, 1981 proposal and in the planning grant proposal that the organizers confused the political function, which was necessary to open up a new space, with a more artistic function of filling a defined theatrical space. Yet the entire Chattanooga "mise-en-scéne" itself was a powerful framing device. In this proposal and others as well, the Charleston and Salzburg view of the "city as a stage"--albeit a bare stage--became a dominant frame, suggesting the actual emptiness of the physical Chattanooga city was itself deeply felt by the festival dreamers and others.

What appears in retrospect to have been intended as a participatory process of responding to an empty space was, not surprisingly to any but naive dreamers and believers, a political process that soon discovered that the conceptual space was not a bare stage. The May 5 proposal was written and edited by the group with a reasonable degree of awareness of what the foundation's goals were and of what its executive director had suggested be included. None of us had any illusions about the power of this newly active foundation, or of its intention to change the status quo in the city.

The Shaping Power of Place

The development of Menotti's three festivals in Italy, America, and Australia is a cultural story of major importance. Menotti's plan to create a festival different from Salzburg and Edinburgh evolved from his strategy of viewing "art as the main course." (All quoted comments on Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in this and other chapters are from the 1986 and 1988 interviews unless otherwise indicated.)

That art was not merely an "after-dinner mint" for entertainment and escape from the day's chores was the new idea Menotti brought to America from its 1958 beginning in a small Italian village of the same name. Differences are not received with eagerness by entrenched interests in many communities; differences with the emotional intensity of the performing arts, particularly when challenging the supremacy of capitalist values, can generate equally intense responses from love to hate.

Responses for suppressing such differences can take many forms.  The record of the struggle to fill Chattanooga's empty festival space is one local example of the power of a philosophy of sameness to suppress dissent, diversity, and, differences. Although it is proposed that a theater of differences could be termed "Menottian," no such specific term for a theater of sameness has presented itself. It must suffice to observe that propagandistic mass spectacles, such as the Nazi fascist versions, by their operative nature, cannot allow aesthetic differences that threaten values of "unity, oneness, sameness, similarities, harmony."

As Western societies have learned through two world wars, it is the tendency to evolve in the direction of totality--the "single controlling mind"--that the democratic concept of plurality and diversity is designed to guard against, not under certain conditions always successfully, as the history of Germany in the 1930s suggests. The intellectual bases for two opposing philosophies of human well-being, which lacks any simple resolution, seem indicated by this line of reasoning. From this perspective, the Riverbend Festival documents show an evolving ideological process to fill an absence with presence, emptiness with meaning, albeit a meaning that functioned to oppose plurality and diversity.

It appears from the record in both Charleston and Chattanooga and from the histories of Salzburg and Stratford that when a major festival is proposed, powerful political and economic forces quickly rise in reaction to fears of restructuring the very identity of the community. This happened in both Charleston and Chattanooga with dramatically different consequences. In Chattanooga, the powerful private citizen character in the drama probably won because there was no powerful public figure or college president with resources to come to rescue the stranger's new and different idea. Many communities have successfully driven off the stranger and bearer of new ideas, as Menotti could be portrayed. This view suggests the special, albeit improbable, nature of traditional Charleston, its visionary mayor, college president, and preservationist, and its strong municipal governmental political structure as being more willing and able to provide an empty space than was Chattanooga.

Charleston presented a hospitable, receptive theatrical stage for Menotti to present a seventeen-day, real-life opera where the "city itself is an art form," as the maestro was quoted on numerous occasions in explaining why he picked Charleston from a list of Southern cities proposed by his staff and the National Endowment for the Arts. This aesthetic marriage of Menotti and Charleston, artist and town theater, resulted in an unusual performance event, according to general manager Nigel Redden in a l986 interview:

I feel that the Spoleto Festival is not like other festivals. It is not like the American Dance Festival, which I worked for, or the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. I have put on some festivals myself--one called New Music America and another called New Dance USA. I think this is more like a long drawn-out Robert Wilson piece--a twenty-four-hour, seventeen-day piece.

Wilson's work has been termed a "theater of visions," part opera and part architecture, sometimes lasting a day or more, such as his epic, as yet unproduced in its totality, twelve-hour the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down.

In other words, Redden envisioned a Menotti operatic production enacted throughout much of the city itself. If this is a "Menottian" theater, it is one with few if any contemporary parallels in its intended multiplicity of directors, bare stages, actors, and audiences. Menotti's response to the city as an art form is so self-conscious, so deliberate, it is surprising that there is no evidence of a Robert Wilson work in the Spoleto festivals to date. Possibly, however, a Wilsonian idea is present in Menotti's town theater. That such a complex idea could not be readily transferred elsewhere without such a creative director, no matter how spectacular the site or wealthy the patron, seems an obvious conclusion.

Some of Robert Wilson's past associates have demonstrated some of his imagistic techniques. Carol Miles' choreography in the 1988 Charleston Spoleto production of Dvorak's "Rusalka" was a masterpiece of dramatic effect in the difficult ballroom scene. I am indebted to her for explaining Robert Wilson's concept of non-traditional theatrical forms. Her own directing and choreography, seen on videotape from several of her works in France in 1986-7, in her 1986 "Hamlet" for the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, and in her "The House of Bernard Alba" at Theater Emory, Emory University, February 1989, were strong influences on the development of my own imagistic festival ideas. A Wilsonian-like festival theater staged throughout an entire city was proposed for Chattanooga's festival by Doris Hays. Possibly one day soon financial support will be granted for Miles own similar proposed production, "City Opera," which is waiting for its own empty space and force.

Looking at the design and boundaries of the emptiness, one gains a perspective similar to that of seeing negative space in the visual arts field. As was suggested in the preceding discussion, both an ideological and physical time and space apparently must exist or be created, as a precondition, before other elements of the festival theater emerge. This pattern appears in the genesis and evolution of Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival. It also emerges in the 1986 and 1988 Charleston interviews. For example, the manager of the Melbourne Spoleto festival, Colin Sturm, noted that both Spoleto, Italy, and Charleston were stagnant, empty spaces that Menotti's artists brought to life. Charleston Mayor Riley has termed this "art power."

Yet the power of art has its limitations when the framing is inappropriate. Menotti said at a press conference at Spoleto 1988 that he felt the Melbourne festivalwas a failure and he did not feel needed there. Mayor Riley quickly responded to this comment by assuring Menotti and the assembled press corps the maestro was very much needed in Charleston, a sign of public support signifying public receptiveness more than courteous display of official hospitality. If the Australian festival (the first was in 1986) did not go well for Menotti, it may be that the sheer size of Melbourne prohibited opening up the space for his type of festival. From the perspective of the importance of a festival's physical setting, assuming the necessity for an empty space in the host community offers practical reasons for exploring the success or failure of some festivals. The lack of ideological empty space offers another strategy for examining the deficiencies of flawed festivals.

The Element of the Empty Space

The festival's ideological and physical space functions as a type of "liminal time and space," that is, a social practice existing as a gap or overlap among the network of formal institutions and social structures.  (The concept of liminality is that derived from the anthropological work of Victor Turner.) 

This has the effect of making a festival a background framing device, no more noticeable than a proscenium arch in traditional stage design, yet no less powerful in shaping the relations of elements within the frame, requiring only a "director" as Peter Brook has implied in the first word, "I," of the beginning pages of his discussion in The Empty Space:

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. [Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1984) 9.]

The opening and closing statements of any work of art or criticism cannot be taken casually and, as a successful director, Brook should be taken literally in this observation. Brook's empty space term has been cited by many. A significant use of the idea, which will be explored further, is found in its development as a key concept by Nggi wa Thiong'o's Decolonizing the Mind:

Drama in pre-colonial Kenya...could take place anywhere--wherever there was an `empty space,' to borrow the phrase from Peter Brook. `The empty space,' among the people, was part of that tradition....Both the missionaries and the colonial administration used the school system to destroy the concept of the `empty space' among the people by trying to capture and confine it in government- supervised urban community halls, schoolhalls, churchbuildings, and in actual theatre buildings with the proscenium stage. Between 1952 and 1962 the `empty space' was even confined behind barbed wire in prisons and detention camps where the political detainees and prisoners were encouraged to produce slavishly pro-colonial and anti-Mau Mau propaganda plays. [Nggi wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind (Harrare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1987) 37-8.]

That the space must first be "empty" to serve as a bare stage seems an obvious point. "Any empty space," Brook said, not "any empty theater." Therefore, we will have to admit even a barren desert as a possible stage. It need not be filled with props--rocks, trees, boxes, rubble, or even dead bodies--to do its work as a bare stage. However, it becomes a bare stage, a theater or "place for seeing" in the Greek sense, only when the "I," the "imagining, creative I," chooses to name the empty space a bare stage so that one person can view another on it. It follows then that the creative mind of this artistic practice, any artistic director, requires only that a space be unfilled to have the potential of a theatrical space, a bare stage that can be filled with some meaning.

That we as artists and spectators alike respond not only to the stage scenery but also to the physical and symbolic environmental context around us has been noted by no less a master of political drama than Winston Churchill, who is quoted on a poster in the office of the Spoleto U.S.A assistant director, Carmen Kovens, as saying, "We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us."

The function of contextual empty space will be a key issue in this effort to understand better what these two festivals are and what they do. One could paraphrase Churchill's statement for this study as: "We shape our festivals and thereafter they shape us." Just as we forget to notice our buildings, we forget to notice our festivals and similar shaping contexts, not as environments that actually determine our beliefs but as powerful theatrical arenas that unobtrusively shape our ideas about what objects are like and unlike, about what, for example, colors of persons belong together or are kept separate.

Aristotle seems correct in noting that festive effects produced by the mise-en-scène put one at the mercy of the technicians, especially at an outdoor festival, but that, on the other hand, the setting design can be a highly artistic element for some directors skilled in this medium. Menotti's town festivals, from this perspective, can be regarded, in the view of the Spoleto festival general manager in 1986, as a seventeen-day performance work on the city stage, which would go far in explaining why this modern Prospero sought an American city that was "an art work in itself." The empty space was as important as its performances, all mise-en-scène with form and content inseparable.

Festivals, then, can be classified as a form of meaning-making theater in bounded spaces. The emphasis is on the visual frame and the special character of the space, which apparently define the type of festival just as the shape of the stage has defined various types of theater as open air, in-the-round, proscenium arch, and thrust stage.

   Table of Contents     Chapter 1     Chapter 2     Chapter 3     Chapter 4     Chapter 5     Chapter 6     Bibliography   After Thoughts--Summer 2001