Visitors:
Updated:
04/18/07
Return to Festival Institute
page
--Introductory Comments--
My appreciation to those many who helped in this scholarly effort is noted below in the dissertation text, which is not organized as a web page and must be read by scrolling to the end, where endnotes are located.
The dissertation text version below is a basic case study of Charleston and Chattanooga in separate chapters with an overview chapter and a conclusions chapter; as the first published form, it does not make clear enough the conceptual framework that can include other festivals and related cultural activities as a book version offers. We recommend to the general reader the book version, The Idea of Festival, which includes web links and will become a CD-ROM book, for other than readers from either Chattanooga or Charleston who may prefer the more focused local chapters of the 1990 study.
In addition to this Emory University 1990 dissertation, Two Town Festivals: Signs of a Theater of Power, the new version, The Idea of Festival, has been completely revised, somewhat like moving furniture around the house for the best feel and fit as new insights and experiences overlay older perspectives. New material since 1990 has been and is being added, and graphics and links, such as to various festivals mentioned, are being added; most of these will yield the festival of the current year. The revised book is now separated into several conceptual chapters instead of the initial Charleston, SC and Chattanooga, TN chapter comparisons. More visuals and formatting will be added but you are invited to participate in this process and send any comments and suggestions to: sidhetzler [@] splittree.org. We welcome corrections and additions to the material presented here and will present dissenting opinions and factual material.
A
note to our readers: We welcome and need financial contributions from our
readers during this period of public accessibility before a CD and printed
version is available for sale. We ask you not to copy and print or reprint
this material without permission; it is copyrighted but it also is not fair to
use the material without fair compensation. However, much of the original
material was and is publicly available as an Emory University dissertation, and
I feel it is in the public interest to continue to leave the research open to
the public. Please ask for permission before printing any other than small
excerpts for personal reading and distribution or scholarly or media quotation
under the "fair use" rule.
However, the personal financial
cost to me was high in the effort to get a Chattanooga town festival underway,
starting from my 1980 visits to Charleston and Salzburg; the time and
effort during the early stages of its formation before the Lyndhurst Foundation
grant in 1981; the 1985-90 years of academic study and first-hand festival
research; the continued festival research and editing expenses during 1999; and
the computer technology and audio/video/photographic expenses.
Grants and personal donations will be welcomed for the continued effort to
broaden this book and update information from the various festivals mentioned as
well as those yet to be included, such as the Lake Eden Arts Festival and my own
Split Tree festivals in 1994 and Split Tree's evolution since that time to a
"participatory arts center."
Tax-deductible checks can
be sent to: Southern Pitch, Inc., %Split Tree Electronic Press, 597 West
Cove Road, Chickamauga, Georgia 30707; a letter will be given to those needing
it for IRS documentation. The creator of Southern Pitch, a non-profit
organization that nurtures arts and artists and is based in Chattanooga,
Tennessee, is Sorrel Hays, whose 1981 ideas for Chattanooga's festival were
innovative and valued highly. We appreciate her and Southern Pitch's
support for many years of learning about the arts, starting with her piano
recitals in the late 1960s in Chattanooga before her move to New York and fame
as a composer and performer. It was her impromptu piano playing of Mozart
and Schubert in a local motel lounge, following her formal Chattanooga
"Cotton Ball" recital, to the delight of the bar crowd that convinced
me so-called classical music can be enjoyed away from formal concert halls by
all levels of audiences.
Checks as regular
donations can be made out to "Split Tree Electronic Press" and mailed
to Split Tree Electronic Press, Attn: Sid Hetzler, 597 West Cove Road,
Chickamauga, Georgia 30707. Tel: 706/539-2485; fax:
770/216-1596; email: sid [@] splittree.org.
Alternatively, readers
can make a credit card donation in any amount at the Split
Tree Web Store via the PayPal secure payment on-line process.
With permission, a list
of donors will be published in the "After Thoughts" section at the
book's end.
The
Idea of Festival:
Table of
Contents Chapter
1 Chapter
2 Chapter
3 Chapter
4 Chapter
5 Chapter
6
Bibliography
After Thoughts--Summer
2485
Sid Hetzler June 9, 2001 Email: sid [@] splittree.org Return to Split Tree Index Page
Split Tree Electronic Press page
Two Town Festivals: Signs of a Theater of Power
In presenting this dissertation as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for an
advanced degree from Emory University, I agree that the Library of the University shall
make it available for inspection and circulation in accordance with its regulations
governing materials of this type. I agree that permission to copy from, or to publish,
this dissertation may be granted by the professor under whose direction it was written,
or, in his/her absence, by the Dean of the Graduate School, when such copying or
publication is solely for scholarly purposes and does not involve potential financial
gain. It is understood that any copying from, or publication of, this dissertation which
involves potential financial gain will not be allowed without written permission.
NOTICE TO BORROWERS
Unpublished theses deposited in the Emory University Library must be used only in
accordance with the stipulations prescribed by the author in the preceding statement.
The author of this dissertation is:
Sidney N. Hetzler, Jr.
597 West Cove Road
Kensington, Georgia 3O7O7
The director of this dissertation is:
Timothy J. Reiss
New York University
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Comparative Literature
19 University Place, 4th Floor
New York, New York 1OOO3
Users of this dissertation not regularly enrolled as students at Emory University are
required to attest acceptance of the preceding stipulations by signing below. Libraries
borrowing this dissertation for the use of their patrons are required to see that each
user records here the information requested.
Name of User Address Date Type of use
(Examination only or copying)
TWO TOWN FESTIVALS:
SIGNS OF A THEATER OF POWER
By
Sidney N. Hetzler, Jr.
Adviser: Timothy J. Reiss
Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
Approved for the Department:
____________________________
Adviser
____________________________
Date
Accepted:
___________________________
Dean of the Graduate School
___________________________
Date
TWO TOWN FESTIVALS:
SIGNS OF A THEATER OF POWER
By
Sidney N. Hetzler, Jr.
B.A., Vanderbilt University, 1962
M.S., Boston University, 1973
Adviser: Timothy J. Reiss
Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Emory University in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts
COPYRIGHT 199O
Dedicated to Albert J. Sullivan
TWO TOWN FESTIVALS:
SIGNS OF A THEATER OF POWER
By
Sidney N. Hetzler, Jr.
B.A., Vanderbilt University, 1962
M.S., Boston University, 1973
Adviser: Timothy J. Reiss
Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
An Abstract of
A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Emory University in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts
199O
ABSTRACT
This semiotic analysis compares the discursive practice of two contemporary town festivals in Charleston, South Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, as theatrical expressions of a dominant order's power.
It argues the aesthetic, political, and social desirability of festivals of "difference" as opposed to those of "sameness"--"arts" as opposed to "heritage", "serious" as opposed to "bread-and-circus"--and indicates the potentially destructive effect of a festival of sameness.
These and other claims are derived from an analysis of three key categories: the festival's relationship to empty town spaces (its place), its purposes (its ideal), and the presence or absence of an artistic director (its force). These three elements provide the study's conceptual design and suggest, in their interdependence, several conclusions about the nature, function, and meaning of these two festivals.
Charleston's Spoleto Festival U.S.A. and Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival were selected
for comparative analysis because Chattanooga's festival sponsors deliberately rejected
Charleston's "arts" model of festival for a "heritage" form. The
significance of this decision, how and why this change of direction happened, and its
meanings are the basic issues explored.
Chapter I constructs the interpretive frame of two basic festival forms and outlines an
analytical approach. Chapter II describes key elements in the founding of the Spoleto
Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, South Carolina, during 1975-77, based primarily on the
recollections of its first board chairman. Chapter III analyzes the founding of the
Riverbend Festival in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during 198O-82, through the story of the
creation of a citizen's group that was established to sponsor the festival. Chapter IV
analyzes a third model of festival, the Chautauqua Institution at Jamestown, New York, in
relation to a comparison of key elements of Spoleto Festival U.S.A. and Riverbend, and
proposes several conclusions about the nature, function, and meaning of the forms of
festival discussed.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Background 1
Subject and Scope 5
General Thesis 7
Acknowledgements 15
CHAPTER I
TIME AND PLACE OF DIFFERENCES:
THE IDEA OF A FESTIVAL THEATER
Stories of Origin 21
Art Power and the Element of the Artistic Director 25
The Element of the Empty Space 28
The Element of Purpose 31
Functions Mode of Analysis 36
Perspectives and Semantic Framing 45
Implications of Festivals Viewed As a "Place of the Different" 49
CHAPTER II
SPOLETO FESTIVAL U.S.A.:
WHERE FOOTLIGHTS CAST NO SHADOWS
Menotti's New Theater 58
Functions of a "Serious" Festival 61
Three Basic Elements: Artistic Director, Empty
Space, Purposes 67
Artistic Director: Why Menotti? 69
The Empty City Space: Why Charleston? 81
The Element of Purpose: Menotti's Festival Idea 91
Difference and Sameness 100
CHAPTER III
CHATTANOOGA'S RIVERBEND FESTIVAL:
FROM A THEATER OF DIFFERENCE TO A THEATER OF SAMENESS
The Struggle to Fill the City's Empty Festival Space 106
Absence of an Artistic Director 113
The Element of Purpose: Festival Planning Seminars 118
Functions of the Riverbend Festival: Embedded Meanings in Two Stories of Origin 123
Analysis of Riverbend Objectives 128
Riverbend: Meanings and Messages 136
CHAPTER IV
TWO TOWNS, TWO FESTIVALS, MULTIPLE MEANINGS OF "FESTIVAL"
An "Arts" Festival-Creature Encounters its "Heritage" Habitat 152
Menotti's Logocracy 156
Primary Function of a Festival: Chautauqua--Forum for Conflicting Views 157
Comparative Categories 168
Retrospective 176
Restatement of Claims: Intent, Function, Effect 179
Four Conclusions: Festivals' Shaping of "Reality," Openness, Conflict, Play 185
Toward a Semiotic of Festival 190
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
APPENDIX A
Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Materials 217
Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning
will have its homecoming festival.
M. M. Bakhtin
"Methodology for the Human Sciences," Speech Genres & Other Late Essays
Chautauqua is a place, an ideal, and a force.
John Heyl Vincent, founder;
Chautauqua Institution, Jamestown, New York,
188Os, quoted on a postcard picturing the audience
in a traveling Chautauqua lyceum tent.
Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of
competition of surprises that stimulates our
consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.
Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space
PREFACE
Background
Conflicting artistic dreams, competing images of "desirable" community social order, and opposing political and economic discourses underlie the stories of the origins of the two town festivals chosen for this analysis. One began in its American version in 1977 in Charleston, South Carolina; and the other, inspired by the Charleston model, started in 1982 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Each festival might not have emerged from its host community. Each, with small influences, could have evolved very differently from its present form. Today, they represent greatly differing examples of the cultural practice of "town festival."
In the stories connected with their creation can be found a key to their original intended meanings, meanings that on the surface are as contradictory as the few published accounts of how they came to be. Here is one reporter's 1984 version of the Chattanooga festival's origin:
One of the key figures in the development of the Riverbend Festival is an urban planner from New York who conceived a precursor to the festival as "shock therapy" for Chattanooga.
Gianni Longo, president of the Institute for Environmental Action in New York City, came to town about five years ago at the request of the Lyndhurst Foundation. His task was to assess the quality of life in Chattanooga and suggest ways to improve it.
After discovering the city was "polarized" along economic and racial lines, Longo set as a goal "getting a lot of people together in a friendly manner."
The urban expert was also interested in getting the people together downtown. "People in Chattanooga thought of downtown as a place to go to the bank, to park their car," Longo said.... "But they didn't think of it as a place to take their kids, or take a walk. They thought it was too dangerous."
What was needed to change that perception was "shock therapy" of a sort, Longo said. "It had to be something of such magnitude that, despite their doubts about mingling in a crowd, people could not resist."
The irresistible event was Five Nights in Chattanooga: five concerts by musical artists, offered free of charge, at night, in the heart of downtown.
Thousands of people jammed the vacant lot across from Miller Park and spilled over into the streets.... "We had everything--bluegrass, blues, pop, country-western," Longo said.
...Five Nights proved that a strong enough attraction would draw people downtown in the evening and led to the formation of Friends of the Festival [emphasis mine], the primary support organization for the Riverbend Festival.(1)
Here is another reporter's 1984 version of the same festival's origin:
Sid Hetzler, food broker by trade, music lover at heart, traveled to Charleston, S.C., in 198O for the world-renowned Spoleto Festival. He returned to Chattanooga convinced that the city could support a festival of its own.
Hetzler envisioned a showcase for local talent, emphasizing classical music, opera and other fine arts; a festival that would draw people downtown and introduce a broad cross-section of the public to the arts.
Several of Hetzler's friends responded enthusiastically to his idea. A small group started meeting irregularly, planting the seeds for what would become Friends of the Festival [emphasis mine].
Four years later, Friends of the Festival has mushroomed into a 3O-member committee. The fruit of its labors, the Riverbend Festival, is now entering its third year. It has developed into an annual extravaganza with Formula I boat racing, big-name entertainers--such as this year's star, Crystal Gayle--and a budget of $6OO,OOO.
Some critics of the festival--including Hetzler, who is no longer involved--claim it has grown too big too quickly, abandoning the original fine-arts spirit and endangering its own solvency.
The festival has had its share of organizational and financial blunders. But supporters insist problems are to be expected with any fledgling project. They point to what they see as a bright future for the Riverbend. And even critics such as Hetzler and some other early Friends members concede that success for the festival is crucial to the city's positive self-image.
Jack Murrah, associate of the Lyndhurst Foundation, the festival's chief backer during its first three years, agrees. It is "very, very important (that the festival succeed), in large measure because it has become the big event it is. It is (the city's) annual image-making set of activities that people have decided to get behind [emphasis mine]."(2)
These are not, as may appear, stories of two separate festivals; they are manifestations of the complexity of a process that created one town's "festival theater." Both articles were printed on the same page, on the same day, in the same newspaper, although the second was featured as the primary analysis of the festival's origin.
Can both versions be "true?" Is the "meaning" of what a cultural practice is and does dependent on who is doing the "reporting?" Or is such a practice's meaning dependent on unnamed, anonymous "people" who have the power, money, and will to "get behind" and to dominate the community's "image-making set of activities," as is implied above by a foundation spokesperson. Do these stories of origin represent a festival world of "logodaedaly" in which multiple truths struggle but live happily side-by-side as a theatrical mirroring of pluralistic beliefs of "democratic" societies? Or do they signify a Darwinian theater of power in which only the "strongest" homogeneous festival forms survive by destroying threatening heterogeneous practices of festival?
Such questions and related enigmas suggested this semiotic comparison of the discursive practice of two town festivals and their "signs of power."(3) It is not an ethnography of two festivals nor a historical monograph of the founding of two urban festivals, although such studies would be valuable. This analysis is a selective semiotic construct of the written and remembered stories of two intensely creative moments in the life of these two communities, moments that resulted in two very different town arts festivals. Its purpose is to reveal repetitive key signifiers, or their absence, which point toward the more important meanings embedded in these untold stories. The initial approach, general methodology, and concluding interpretations are drawn primarily from readings in the disciplines of semiotic and drama theory. Insights from literary criticism, urban history, symbolic anthropology, and mass communication theory also are employed as appropriate.
Austria's Salzburg Festival, Menotti's Italian Spoleto Festival, Canada's Stratford
Festival, Scotland's Edinburgh Festival, and New York State's Chautauqua Institution are
regarded by arts critics generally as representative of the most successful contemporary
examples of the town festival genre. This study will not discuss these other festivals,
except for a brief concluding discussion of the alternative model of the unique Chautauqua
Institution. They are cited to provide a reference for what are generally regarded as
examples of the most highly developed form of the contemporary town festival. As such,
these international town arts festivals function as a contextual frame for broader
discussion of the signification and communication functions of these powerful cultural
entities. Eventually an extension of this analysis is expected to take the form of a
semiotic of festival, that is, as an interpretive construct of the relational web of signs
and sign clusters designated "festival" historically and in contemporary life.
Subject and Scope
Charleston's Spoleto Festival U.S.A. and Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival are of academic interest in part because of their extreme differences. They are also useful for study because Chattanooga's festival sponsors in 1981 deliberately rejected Charleston's "arts" model of festival for a "heritage" form, a decision that led to official support for what can be termed a festival of "sameness" rather than a festival of "difference."(4) The meaning of this characterization, how and why this change of direction happened, and its general implications are the basic issues this analysis explores.
Several interpretations are derived from an analysis of three key "semiotic"(5) categories for each festival: the festival's relationship to empty town spaces (its place), the stated purposes or objectives (its ideal), the role of an artistic director (its force). Each of these three functions, which are regarded as primary elements of festivals, compress a wide variety of empirical data from each festival. They provide the conceptual design that organizes the study and suggest, in their interrelationships, several conclusions about the nature, function, and meaning of these two festivals.
Documentary materials from the oral interviews of those associated with Spoleto Festival U.S.A. are included in Appendix A, "Spoleto Materials." Collectively they, along with excerpts from documents quoted in Chapter II and the endnotes to that chapter, compose the body of materials described in Chapter I as "stories of origin."
The analysis is divided generally into four parts: analytical perspective, selective theoretical history, comparison of key signifiers, and reflection on implications of the study. Its emphasis is on interpreting the thematic organization of available materials from Chattanooga and Charleston. No complete historical treatments of these two festivals exist, and what is to be discussed here is the period of their founding and not their entire histories.(6)
Chapter I constructs the interpretive frame that explains why these two festivals were
selected as examples of two basic festival forms and how they are viewed. Chapter II
describes key elements in the founding of Charleston's Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in 1975-77,
based on interviews from 1986 to 1989 with several individuals involved (primary source
records at the festival office were not yet open to the public). Of these materials, the
principal source is the transcribed oral history of Spoleto Festival U.S.A.'s first board
chairman, Theodore S. Stern. Chapter III discusses the founding of Chattanooga's Riverbend
Festival in 198O-82 through the story of the creation of the non-profit group, Friends of
the Festival, Inc., which was established to sponsor the festival. My experience as first
president of this organization provides the primary source materials for these events.
Chapter IV addresses several implications generated by these two forms of town festivals,
briefly discusses an alternative model (the Chautauqua Institution), and proposes several
tentative views about the nature, function, and meaning of "festival."
General Thesis
The principal contention is that most "serious" festivals function as a special type of theatrical time and space where the "different" is presented intentionally and where "new" artistic and other imaginative productions often are introduced. Allowing in each case for several commercial and programming exceptions, this statement is much more descriptive of the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston and several other festivals examined during the 198Os in North America and Europe than it is of the Riverbend Festival in Chattanooga.
Although this statement implies that a "serious" festival is "better" or more "successful" than other forms, such as a "commercial" or "heritage" festival, that would be a conclusion beyond the intentions of this argument or the evidence presented. However, that a "serious" festival (see Chapter I, Tyrone Guthrie's definition) has greater affective power seems to be the case. Such judgmental language is impossible to avoid if the aesthetic and political implications of the festival theater are carefully considered in light of its intended use as an instrument of social persuasion. The problem of differing definitions of terms, such as festival, serious, difference, sameness, and new, is addressed in its various manifestations throughout the study as a semantic concern, as well as a significant discursive reality. For this study, the terms "different" and "new" are used interchangeably in opposition to "same" and "old." The final chapter offers linguistic alternatives to such categorical oppositions, which the festival form itself tends to reject.
Questions of the social, aesthetic, political, religious, and economic desirability of the different and the new could be viewed as matters of personal taste and values. Arguing that Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival lacks "avant garde" operas, ballets, and plays, for example, and therefore offers little different or new may offend its blue grass, blues, and rock music lovers, who can point out with pride that traditional Louisiana Zydeco music apparently was heard for the first time in the city at the festival. The festival's sponsors could also rebut the charge of "sameness" by pointing out that the local symphony plays, normally with a popular entertainer, one night at each festival, and that in 1985 a composition for guitar and orchestra premiered at the festival. However, this practice was abandoned after that year. Increasingly, such Riverbend festival "differences" appear to be a tribute to the illusory theater, masking the "sameness" of biological homogeneity and artistic rigidity through an extreme commerciality that perpetuates existing political, religious, social, and economic monolithic structures.
Such issues raise far deeper philosophical concerns about the nature of the societies in which we not only survive but also enjoy and, as Faulkner suggested in accepting the Nobel prize, "endure." In sailing through such treacherous waters of subjectivity, it is my intention to be a "loving critic" rather than a "critical lover" of these two festivals, which have grown to be important local institutions as well as representative forms of contemporary festival practice and social order. That Charleston's particular expression of itself through its festival has generated international notice from the arts community suggests that such a festival of "differences" possesses important functions absent in festivals lacking such critical attention. This requires an effort to identify the key functions required for a festival to attract such critical notice from the interpretive community.
If several key elements of these two festivals are identified, and if their basic social and political functioning appears reasonably clear, then the limited aims of this dissertation will have been realized. Detailed ethnographies and full histories of both festivals and their complex relationship with their communities and larger world would be valuable in confirming, modifying, or rejecting the conclusions proposed here.
It should be admitted in this context that I do have an "ax to grind," the creation of a "sharpened instrument" of thought that pleads the political, social, aesthetic, economic, and pleasurable desirability of festivals of "difference" as opposed to those of "sameness"--"arts" as opposed to "heritage"--"serious" as opposed to "bread-and-circus." This should not be construed to mean that I regard "heritage" festivals as undesirable, but rather that these "political" theaters tend to exclude aesthetic sources of the vitality associated with the new and different ideas that drive social change and sustain the learned respect for differences that represents "civilized" behavior. This would not be a "serious" dissertation if it argued no point of view, advanced no vision, ignored the realities of personal experience, or merely represented without interpretation. And it would not be a fair document if it did not respect the differences and opinions of others equally sincere in their intentions. Yet the destructive power of the opposing "sameness" philosophy, when carried to extremes, is in actuality the general political reality reflected in Lyotard's admonition in The Postmodern Condition to, in effect, "honor the differences":
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one....The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.(7)
Increasingly, during the course of the past four years of formal academic study, T. S. Eliot's observation in "The Four Quartets" that we return "to the place where we started/And know it for the first time" has been given a personal relevance that suggests caution in attempting to interpret any event in which one was personally involved. The document advocating a "celebration of togetherness," written with a friend one spring afternoon in 1981, which some have said was the first burst of energy that led directly to Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival, is a "starting point" I returned to for this study and truly began to "know for the first time." Self and non-self were not easily separated. One sense of my subjective problem in studying this particular festival, its genesis, and its intended and unintended meanings was suggested by Milan Kundera in Laughable Loves:
Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it had.(8)
My "glance" (Chapter III) back to 198O-81, a period that led to Chattanooga's renewal of a town festival in 1982 and that also generated significant debate about the nature of festival, can be viewed as demonstrating the actual public and private participation process by which a new space was made for a festival intended to be different from any in the city's recent experience. This collective community "composition" period resembles the anthropological description of "liminal" time and space. Yet Riverbend soon departed from its original objectives, and the imaginative outpouring of local creative energy that might have been has been forgotten by many of us who were involved at the time. Most records of such "questioning" periods of civic ferment, which also apparently occurred in Charleston, can be lost to future scholars because it appears the institutions that emerge from this "in-between zone" become dominant and tend to repress knowledge of other forms that might have emerged and possibly would have threatened the present dominant entity. It is my hope that the "questioning" attitude that produced Riverbend will continue and that this study will contribute to that "festival spirit" of inquiry.
One example of such continuing curiosity about the possibility of a special festival "spirit" led to my participation in a type of festival predicted from the analysis but not experienced or noticed in the literature. I was exposed to a new kind of festival when several members of the Chattahoochee Country Dancers (New England contra dancing) group in Atlanta, after hearing of the ideas presented here, said they thought the bi-annual Black Mountain traditional music and dance festival was very different from the examples I had mentioned. This festival, located at a church camp and lake near the Black Mountain community some ten miles west of Ashville, North Carolina, was in its eleventh year in May 1989. Although some of its features are characteristic of any festival, its apparent lack of political, commercial, or religious purpose suggests there could be a festival based on the play principle as described by J. Huizinga's work on the play element in culture and J. Pieper's theory of festival. It represents a festival theater in which various types of folk group dancing and even modern couples swing dancing are its primary purpose, as opposed to civic image building, increasing tourism, or riverfront development. However, attendance is almost completely white, which suggests the hidden racist effect of traditional "heritage" festivals. More information is needed to explore this alternative festival form; however, conversations with one of Black Mountain's founders, the popular contra dance caller Fred Park, make it clear that large numbers of participants are discouraged in that the festival is no longer advertised and, to prevent overcrowded dance floors, attendance is now limited. Park is one of the festival's sources of artistic energy, probably the equivalent of Charleston's Menotti; his choreography, or "calling," is regarded as a special event, much as Menotti's directing of an opera is of unusual interest. Park's views on the festival and my participation in it strongly suggest that no purpose other than "play" or "pleasure" explains the growing popularity of this alternative to what is termed in this study a political or propagandistic festival theater.
The Black Mountain Festival of Traditional Music and Dance announced "The Black Mountain New World Festival" to follow its customary weekend program for May 1990. It advertised a celebration of "contemporary culture as influenced by global communication" with "contemporary music, all kinds of dance, new games, group art, environmentally sound technology, and surprises." The emergence of a festival of "differences" from a successful festival of "sameness" is suggested by this development, one that could also occur in similar heritage festivals such as Chattanooga's Riverbend. It should be recognized that the uncertainty of social effects in this and similar "heritage" festivals precludes simplistic conclusions about such complex cultural practices.
Acknowledgements
My curiosity about festivals started with a visit to Charleston's Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Festival in 198O, after reading a newspaper article about its effects on the city. That visit led to a visit to the 198O Salzburg Festival. During the 198Os, I was able to return to Charleston's evolving festival and experience the power of that city's and its festival's artistic magic. Soon after I began graduate study at Emory University in January of 1985, Dr. Edna Bay, Associate Dean of Emory's Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, suggested that in view of my experience in Chattanooga, I might consider the study of festivals. In the summer of 1985, while a student in Emory's British Studies program at University College, Oxford, I visited several British festivals and began the formal research for this study. In 1986 I visited Chicago's Ravinia Festival and other Chicago urban festivals. In 1987 I visited the festivals of Stratford, Ontario; the Chautauqua Institution at Jamestown, New York, and Artpark, at Niagara Falls, New York. I attended all but one of Chattanooga's Riverbend festivals. Without the assistance of the leaders and busy staff members of these festivals, this work could not have been written. I thank them all for giving me precious moments during their busiest time for answering questions, for admission to festival events, and for their encouragement in exploring the art of the festival.
A 1985 Emory University seminar, "Toward an Archeology of Modern European Theater," offered by Professor Timothy J. Reiss (now chair of comparative literature at New York University), provided my first exposure to various semiotic and drama theories that offered a conceptual language suitable for beginning an analysis of festivals. Professor Reiss' tolerance for my limited understanding of these vast fields of knowledge--and his endless patience with my curiosity about semiotics as a possible extension of my background in communication studies--provided the personal and scholarly leadership needed to pursue the topic of festivals to the end of the beginning that this dissertation represents. To him and the other two readers of this work, Robert Detweiler of Emory University's Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, and Robert Segrest of the University of Florida's Department of Architecture, I wish to express my appreciation for their assistance, patience, and understanding during the slow genesis and development of these ideas. The counsel of Professor Monica Rector, a good friend and colleague in semiotics, and was extremely helpful in the early formulation of the study and in suggesting an earlier title for it, "Writing Festival; Writing on Festival," which suggests the postmodernist character of a larger work yet to be written.
I especially thank my parents, Doris and Neal Hetzler, for making it possible for me to take time away from business and farm activities for this research.
Several business associates, particularly William Krause, David N. Brooks, Jr., and Grant Tuttle of McKee Baking Company's purchasing department, were especially tolerant of those occasions when I was not present to conduct business as usual; their support generated the income without which this work would not have been written.
The editorial assistance and encouragement of Dorothy DuBose in particular as well as Tanya Augsburg and Charles Sills of Emory University's Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts in reviewing both the substance and style of drafts of this work was much needed and appreciated.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the stimulation, help, and encouragement of professors, colleagues, festival lovers, musicians, friends, and relatives who contributed directly or indirectly to this work. They include: Edna G. Bay, Fred Berringer, Paul Bouissac, Daniel Bowles, Reneé Brachfeld, John Bugge, David Darling, Catherine Eagar, Dorinda Evans, Elizabeth Farr, John Farr, Jean-Claude Gardin, Doris (Sorrel) Hays, Joan E. Hetzler, Morris C. Hetzler, William R. Hetzler, Bernard Holland, Deanne Irvine, J. Nelson Irvine, Art Jennings, J. Kenneth Kansas, Gianni Longo, John T. Lupton, Vernon Magnuson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Linda Metcalf, Denis Mickiewicz, Carol Miles, Sharon Mills, Deaderick Montague, Will Montague, Jack Murrah, Charlotte Muse, Fred Park, W. A. Bryan Patten, Z. Cartter Patten, Robert A. Paul, David Rawle, Monica Rector, Nigel Redden, Joseph P. Riley, Jr., Arthur Rivituso, Eloise Robbins, Frank M. (Mickey) Robbins, III, Dalton Roberts, Sally Robinson, Samuel Robinson, Charles A. Rose, Thomas Sebeok, Toby Simon, Bruce Storey, Albert J. Sullivan, Allen Tullos, Charles S. Wadsworth, and Dana F. White.
Special appreciation is due to Dr. Theodore S. Stern, Spoleto Festival U.S.A.'s first board chairman, for granting permission to reproduce the transcript of his complete story of the founding of Charleston's festival, and also to him and to Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., for hosting the Chattanooga Friends of the Festival group's visit to Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in 1981.
NOTES
CHAPTER I
TIME AND PLACE OF DIFFERENCES:
THE IDEA OF A FESTIVAL THEATER
Stories of Origin
The basic desire "to festival" is not unlike the social impulse that for uncertain motives makes one ask, "What if we had a party?" Such a fragile impulse may be killed by such thoughts as: "What if nobody came?" "How do we pay for it?" "What if it rains?" "Where will they park?" Only a strong purpose can overcome such reasonable anxieties. The simple urge to overcome isolation, alienation, and simple loneliness may drive the urge to have a party, to "festival."
For example, Gian Carlo Menotti, founder of the Spoleto festivals, seems to have drawn upon his festivals as a source of renewed personal artistic energy. His actions could be interpreted as a way of justifying his own existence as an artist, as well as a political step toward proving the value of artists in general. He has said that he felt his creative life was at an end in his forties, when he turned to the work of bringing life to the village of Spoleto, Italy, using "art" to show the power of art.(9) One of Menotti's reasons for intervening in the affairs of the small Italian village was that he wanted to prove art was not only an after-dinner mint but that it could be the main meal itself, not the soup but the main course.(10) Menotti's anecdote illustrates what might be called a "creation myth" or a "story of origin" that emerges over time as a simple story told over and over in the festival programs and in the news media.
In the few complete histories of the international arts festivals, such as Gallup's recent Salzburg Festival,(11) a recurring issue is the public questioning of the original idea of the festival. Festival officials and critics frequently ask whether previous, current, and future programming is "true" to the original idea. In Salzburg's case the original idea was to stage a medieval play in front of the scenic town's beautiful cathedral. Today's musical emphasis on Mozart evolved later, although late nineteenth-century festival efforts there did include Mozart. The shape and character of that "idea" remains the core of one of the world's great art and music festivals. It suggests that such stories of origin, which in this case emphasize the town's physical beauty as a theater, can provide an access point for understanding the multiple meanings of these unique social institutions in other times and places.
Similar "creation myths" are found in stories of the origin of other festivals, whose actual founding events have been obscured by time, publicity agents, or new masters. "Who cares about the `truth?'" a cynic might ask. "Leave sleeping dogs alone," an investor in property adjacent to a festival once said privately during an interview for this study. A practical reply is that some important lesson might be learned by taking a closer look at why and how new social entities emerged from the chaotic "soup" of times past, a lesson or two that might have value when similar choices again will exist. An equally practical reply is that such stories of origin are interesting and pleasurable in themselves as an art form and need no other justification for their telling.
For a critic, the importance of the "text" of a creation myth, and its expression in the festival itself and its brochures, is that it "functions" as a steering device for continuing the festival in the direction its various shapers intended. "Why a festival in Charleston?" The actual answers vary widely. "Well, Mr. Menotti wanted a nice place to have a festival." "Menotti said our city was an art form in itself." "A friend of Menotti's persuaded him to come here." "The National Endowment said to spend tax money on artists in America, not on going to Italy." "Maestro Menotti wanted to show that artists are valuable to society and should be given better treatment." "Art should not be an after dinner mint but the main meal." (This last statement was the reason most frequently mentioned in the 1986-88 Charleston interviews). It is apparently not recorded anywhere, not even in an informal history, that one powerful local citizen did his best to keep the festival out of Charleston.(12) Possibly this incident is one reason that, after eleven years, no official Spoleto Festival U.S.A. history exists.
A deeper probe of Spoleto Festival U.S.A. reveals several complicated stories: a mayor who assumed responsibility for the festival when it appeared doomed; Menotti as a famous artist fighting inexperienced if well-meaning local control of artistic performances; Frances Edmunds, a strong architectural preservationist, who became a strong supporter of Spoleto Festival U.S.A.'s changes. It would have been more probable that some of those Charlestonians most involved, such as the mayor and a college president and a preservationist who had the most to fear from the coming of a new, "foreign," thing, would have been intimidated successfully by the powerful opposition's predictable warnings of harmful effects for the historic community.
From this perspective the presence of a Menotti, an experienced composer and festival artistic director who was and remains the principal designer of the festival, suggests a study of the festival's "story of origin" as a starting point in understanding not only what happened and why, but also what the meanings of this series of events signify. The examples of the written and recollected "stories of origin" from the Charleston and Chattanooga festivals provide the critical "textual" foundation on which to build more fully developed interpretations of these festivals and their multiple meanings.
Official "stories of origin" of a festival, and possibly those of similar social structures, can be contradictory in the written and recalled record. The participants often have differing recollections of these emotional times. The records of Charleston's and Chattanooga's festival productions suggest that several "true histories" of these mythic moments can co-exist without any reconciliation possible. The questions that emerge from this perspective have far-reaching public implications that merit careful consideration.
Of the three elements chosen for analysis, one principal concern is the use and abuse
of "art power," as Charleston's mayor (see Chapter II) has termed his belief in
the positive effects of art and artists.
Art Power and the Element
of the Artistic Director
Why would anyone fear Menotti's festival or resist giving power to an artistic director at a festival's inception? One explanation can be found in The Illusion of Power, where Stephen Orgel describes a subtle artistic problem of audience participation in the court masque of James I of England:
The climactic moment of the masque was nearly always the same: the fiction opened outward to include the whole court, as masquers descended from pageant car or stage and took partners from the audience. What the noble spectator watched, he ultimately became. The greatest problems in such a form are posed by protocol. Masquers are not actors; a lady or gentleman participating in a masque remains a lady or a gentleman, and is not released from the obligation of observing all the complex rules of behavior at court....But playing a part, becoming an actor or actress, constitutes an impersonation, a lie, a denial of the true self. Prynne's work on The Scourge of Players in 1633 spoke for many in viewing the woman actors as notorious whores. Now for speaking roles professionals had to be used and this meant that the form, composite by nature, was in addition divided between players and masquers, actors and dancers.(13)
The masque form developed for James I and his queen rapidly separated into two sections:
The first, called the antimasque, was performed by professionals, and presented a world of disorder or vice, everything that the ideal world of the second, the courtly main masque, was to overcome and to supercede.(14)
The parallel between the festival and the "fringe" festivals that often evolved suggests the "antimasque" character of the fringe, which the main festival must dominate.
Orgel also notes in this discussion of the masque that Renaissance festivals were the province of the greatest artists of the age. He points out that the age believed in the "power" emphasis of art to persuade, transform, preserve, and masques could no more be dismissed as flattery than could portraits. Shakespeare's The Tempest, he argues, illustrates the use of art to create belief, a process that appears to be a similarity between that age and the current age of carefully staged political television spectacle. The action of Prospero's masque within the play is cited to show that it is Prospero's unique vision and quality of mind that have been controlling--steering--the play:
In an obvious way that power is the power of imagination, but only if we take all the terms of the phrase literally. Imagination here is real power: to rule, to control and order the world, to change or subdue other men, to create; and the source of the power is imagination, the ability to make images, to project the workings of the mind outward in a physical active form, to actualize ideas, to conceive actions. The mind for Prospero, then, is an active and ongoing faculty (not, that is, a contemplative one) and the relation between his art and his power is made very clear by the play.(15)
In the most literal sense, then, it is "making believe" that "makes belief," the artist "acting upon the world, not within it" in a discourse of hidden power. It is a true tribute to the idea that "making believe makes belief," that "art power" does translate into real power.
From this perspective, it seems clear why business executives in Charleston and
Chattanooga and even ancient Athens(16) would fear the
coming of a Prospero before their plans were fixed. That their festival's stories of
origin leave out this part of the story is not surprising; what is surprising is the
extraordinary fact not of critical acclaim of the Charleston festival but that it ever was
born. The Chattanooga festival of, to be brief, "sameness" was predictable; the
Charleston festival of, for a short label, "differences" was unexpected and
unlikely in such a tradition-conscious city. One can speculate that the composer and
impresario in Menotti was not unaware of the inherent tensions involved in bringing an
avant garde festival to such a community. More likely it was the expectant civic
leadership that was unaware of the onslaught of the "new" about to launch itself
from their city. As can be seen from recollections of a leading banker's reaction after
visiting the Spoleto, Italy, festival (see Chapter II), some local civic leaders
apparently viewed this "new thing" more as a "beast slouching toward
`Charlestontown' to be born," to paraphrase a line from Yeats' "The Second
Coming," where traditional practices would "fall apart" and the
"center would not hold." It was to mean the opening of new spaces where the
artist would hold center stage.
The Element of the Empty Space
If the category of artistic director as a primary source of artistic imagination emerges as a basic festival function, regardless of whether such a person is in fact present or absent, then the element of the surrounding physical environmental frame that attracts artistic interest requires examination. It appears that the festival's ideological and physical space itself 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.(17) 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.(18)
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 in the final chapter, 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.(19)
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.
We may say provisionally that Aristotle was 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.
The Element of Purpose
The physical nature of the festival theater, although an important element in circumscribing its particular empty space, appears to be only one primary form of classification. The intentions of its creators form another classification category. From this view the theater has been labeled one of "cruelty," absurdity," "essence," "alienation," and so on, generally based on the dramatist's apparent intention. A close examination of the written record from the creative process followed by the Charleston and Chattanooga festival organizers reveals a misunderstanding, often a source of tension, about the subtle differences of goals, methods, and ends--or, in other terms, intentions, functions, and effects.
Brook's view of the "deadly, holy, rough, immediate" theater is grounded on the effect, not just on audience response but on active participation. He says near his conclusion:
...we can see that without an audience there is no goal, no sense. What is an audience? In the French language amongst the different terms for those who watch, for public, for spectator, one word stands out, is different in quality from the rest. `Assistance'--I watch a play: `j' assiste à une pièce. To assist--the word is simple: it is the key.(20)
From this perspective Brook's "empty space" has not only the three primary elements of director, stage, and actor but also a fourth, an audience of "watchers," or, in his precise sense, "assisters." For the festival "without an audience there is no goal, no sense."
Festivals can be defined provisionally as an essentially theatrical genre of artistic multi-functional structures composed of context, text, and subtext--"artistic" in terms of the medium and effect if not necessarily in terms of a more "political or social" intention. Most traditional literary, semiotic, and structural analyses of artistic works have focused on these three dimensions as separate entities, with the written text receiving emphasis as the primary meaning-making code. However, less attention has been given to the problem posed by the possibility that "contexts," such as the court itself, can be the product of the artistic imagination as much as "texts," such as the actual masques, and their underlying structural subcodes, or "subtexts," such as Prospero's masque. What is most noticeable is that the festival "operates," or "functions," whether consciously intended or not by its creators and administrators, as a "container of signifiers" from which any traditional "unity of action" is often absent at the programming "textual" level but appears upon careful examination to be present at the contextual level. Within this frame, as will be described in Chapters II and III, the founders' intentions shape a signifying practice with a clear "unity of action," where the essential structural logic springs from the range of textual differences.
The logic of seemingly incompatible features can be noted in complaints about a festival. A recent history, for example, has reported two seemingly "inappropriate" elements in Austria's "elitist" Salzburg Festival, one a "carnival atmosphere" and the other an "anti-festival protest":
In past decades many critics decried Salzburg snobbishness; now they moan about the city's carnival atmosphere brought about by the advent of mass tourism....Most of these tourists will never set foot in a concert--anywhere--but they make life uncomfortable for those who will, and destroy the intimacy and charm which are Salzburg's trump cards....
In Salzburg this protest [in 1971] against the older generation took the form of the creation of an anti-Festival, Die Szene de Jugend, which as its title implies, was aimed at the youth of Salzburg who loved art and despised the bourgeoisie who paid a fortune for their tickets. The anti-Festival took to the streets, put on outdoor plays, operas, dances and poetic recitations...As time went on, the anger of the locals subsided, the Szene became more organized--and inevitably less shocking--and the city began to grant it small subsidies. Ironically, it is now advertised in the brochure of the Festival which it was created to mock.(21)
The idea of an "anti-festival," a term some Austrian sources dispute,(22) emerging within this "elitist" summer music festival and then becoming advertised in the main festival's brochure makes less aesthetic sense when the festival is seen as a collection of discrete performances than when a larger contextual aesthetic logic is assumed in which the contextual "trump cards" of "charm and intimacy" are juxtaposed within a "carnivalesque" atmosphere.
The possibility of isolating three levels of context, text, and subtext can lead to a new "textual" interpretation of the many meanings created by emerging, conflicting "voices" within encrusted performance categories and traditions. The extent of the presence or absence of these voices of "difference" appears to be the key code determining when a social practice becomes a "festival."
Even the word "festival" itself has powerful meaning. This is seen in its many commercial appropriations for shopping malls, newspaper advertising sections, a used car lot's "festival of values," and even by extremist "festivals of racial, ethnic, and religious heritage." Of deeper interest for this study are the specific elements of the festival theatrical practice that possess such "borrowing" power. Commercial users may not appreciate the significance of the idea of encouragement of "differences" that provides the foundation of their commercial exploitation of the practice.
As with any powerful technology, we can wish at times that its nature were a better kept secret; the evidence is clear that Nazi propagandists understood the belief-making power of art and festive spectacle as a form of political theater--a frightenly effective modern "theater of power" when its purpose is revealed:
Without in any way restricting the artistic concept, we may refer to stage and screen as effective instruments of nationalist education. In so doing, we transcend the colorless concept of the "moral institution," which permits extremely free interpretations of esthetics and substance, and depend entirely on the objective to be achieved [emphasis mine], because the concepts and principles of ethics are open to argument as long as these ethics are concealed within the folds of a meaningless creation of such concepts. The problem is clearly defined, however, as soon as we designate as good everything which serves the interest of the nation and as harmful everything that is detrimental to that interest [emphasis mine].
Dramatic art within its various forms grew out of political needs as in the Greek City State (Polis) or out of devotional needs as in the case of the Greek tragedy, and finally it developed through the desire of the masses for entertainment (comedy). Today, the devotional need of the masses is no longer satisfied by the theater but finds expression in the great devotional mass demonstrations of revolutionary National-Socialism which dominates the picture of our day....
It is certain that under present conditions the theater will continue to depend on financial support and government subsidies. This fact alone opens the way for complete control and planned direction, thereby eliminating the need for actual censorship....
Such achievements place the artist above the politician....He is endowed with the power of awakening, quickening, and actually forming those profound forces which constitute the nation's soul, whereas the calculating politician is merely left to act as guide and leader.(23)
Images from actual footage of Nazi "devotional mass demonstrations" in Triumph
of the Will reach most persons at some deep "emotional" level. Only by
questioning the "purpose" of such "demonstrations of unity and
sameness" can their true functioning be revealed for critical inquiry. It is of more
than passing interest to note that the word "festival" does not appear in this
early Nazi document. It was not until the late 193Os that the Nazis appropriated the
Salzburg Festival and paraded its "openness" before the world, a dramatic story
told in the Sound of Music film and in Gallup's A History of the Salzburg
Festival.
Functions Mode of Analysis
What is a festival? One method of defining a complex cultural practice such as festival is to search for equivalent terms that describe its purpose and effects, which is a method of classification by the external qualities of a signifying practice. Standard dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of the word "festival" and related terms include both descriptive and active elements. Used as an adjective, "festival" means joyous, mirthful, gay. Used as a noun, "festival" signifies celebration, entertainment, or series of performances of a certain kind, often held periodically, such as a "Bach" festival. The related term "festivity" includes those same qualities as well as merriment or things done in celebration. A "celebration" is an action to praise, extol, commemorate, glorify, or honor. It is also an action to observe a holiday or an anniversary with festivities or to have a convivial good time. The sense of deliberately constructed meaning signified by celebration is not the same as the more diverse set of phenomena signified by festival.
"Carnival" is a term closely associated with "festival" in the sense of a revelry or time of revelry, festivity, merry-making, or an entertainment with side shows, rides, or games; it can be an activity usually operated as a commercial enterprise by social or charitable organizations. The Latin term, "carnem levare," means "to remove meat," which is associated with the period of feasting and fasting just before the beginning of the Lenten season, of which Mardi Gras is the last day.
Another related activity, "fair," is a gathering of people held at regular intervals for barter and sale of goods. A fair also can be a festival or carnival where there is entertainment and things are sold, such as a bazaar for charity. A fair can be an exhibition, often competitive, of manufactured products with various amusement facilities and educational displays.
"Exposition" normally describes a large public fair or show, often
international in scope; its related meaning in literature and music suggests information
or meaning brought out that was not previously present.
A simplifying commonality is not easily perceived. "People closely gathered together for a brief time in a small space with a specific goal of new experience" is a working definition that comes near to abstracting all but one element of these various standard definitions of such social practices. The exception is a purpose that seemingly is no purpose at all: play--joy, mirth, revelry, merry-making, entertainment. However, is this "purpose" possibly a hidden "effect" masked by the language of acceptable intentions? A broader defining mode is required to address such a semiotic problem in which knowledge of what is knowable is grounded in the limitation of language itself.
The question remains, therefore, how does one define a festival (and similar signifying practices) in addition to labeling its apparent aims or effects? Is there a definition process less dependent on subjective views and desires? To ask, "What is a festival?" generates as many responses as there are festivals themselves. Neither fair nor carnival, neither jamboree nor jubilee, the diversity of "festival" defies easy classification and definition by the tools of familiar language. One is tempted to reply that we cannot know what any thing "is" through our existing, subjective linguistic filters. However, "functional" linguistic filters suitable for a particular object and signifying practice can be derived from a sampling of thoughts from those closest to the practice. This is an approach derived from Vladimir Propp's advice in Morphology of the Folktale to extract classification from the material itself.(24)
Following this method, Vincent's late nineteenth-century "functions" characterization of the influential Chautauqua Institution, one of the oldest American summer arts festivals, provides an initial interpretive classification. Through this "template," festivals can be viewed as unique places waiting for a set of ideals expressed through the force of the artists and participants.(25) A sense of the thought represented by these three "functions" categories--place, ideal, force--and their interrelationships can be gleaned from a few samples of the written and recorded words of a few visionaries involved in the creation and evolution of Charleston's Spoleto Festival U.S.A. As an always incomplete archaeology of past civilizations can be constructed from pot fragments, so a partial archaeology of festivals can be constructed from bits and pieces of fragmentary evidence we find in various statements made about this festival: "...an example and inspiration." "...breeding ground for undesirables." "...reflects the culture of the times." "...$35O million dollars to this area." "...a long drawn-out Robert Wilson piece--a twenty-four-hour, seventeen-day piece." "...joy and pleasure." "...musicians and actors...feed off each other's inspirations." "...convince hardnosed businessmen that there is some financial benefit." "...for the joy of it." "...a social and political message." "...not very sympathetic to [bringing] art to the people." (From Spoleto Festival U.S.A. interviews, 1986).
Economic and aesthetic purposes and effects, underlying social and political functions--all are mixed in this sampling of comments made from 1958 to 1988 in interviews and written statements about Gian Carlo Menotti's Italian, American, and Australian Spoleto festivals. This selection of seemingly contradictory statements suggests that it is futile to search for a unity, or single overall theme, in the inherently plural textual structures of festivals. Even the idea of a textual "unitary theme" seems problematic. Unlike a carnival's historic relationship to the Catholic church's Lenten season, festivals often lack a defining "opposition" such as is found in Bakhtin's "official/unofficial" carnival dichotomy. However, one key to defining a festival by its social functions is found in Bakhtin's view of a festival's "absence of footlights:"
The absence of clearly established footlights is characteristic of all popular-festive forms. The utopian truth is enacted in life itself. For a short time this truth becomes to a certain extent a real existing force.(26)
This suggests the possibility of a theater veiled with multiple scrims that can be drawn to reveal the puppeteer at work. A study of the world of Menotti, as one of the more successful festival "puppeteers," offers the potential for valuable insight into the backstage arena of one of these city operas where footlights cast no shadows.
A "functions" mode of revealing a festival's "nature" and possible "meanings" can be derived from the social, political, economic, and religious signification and communication functions performed. In addition to key phrases from festival creators and managers, a broader sense of "festival" compiled from standard reference works can suggest functional categories. One function is that of a ritual celebration, or reenactment during certain periods or times that anticipate events or seasons (agricultural, religious, or socio-cultural), that give meaning and cohesiveness to an individual within a community. These days or periods generally originated in religious celebrations, and there are ritual commemorations that usually include sacred community meals.
In this sense, the festival can be understood as a social device functioning to make certain meanings "sacred," therefore "untouchable," or "magical." The time-space in which the festival is situated is "bounded" in this sense and temporarily placed off-limits from more secular purposes. Admission into this marked space is governed by various devices, and a wide range of social behavior is temporarily allowed. A festival's potential range of "functions" becomes determined by the particularities of its space, and the purposes and power of the individuals who control the uses of the marked space.
For example, following the original objectives, the Chattanooga Riverbend Festival has made its site, the Ross's Landing public park at the riverfront where the city began, a "special" place. It has been "consecrated" by several hundred thousand "festivallers" for seven years. Now that Chattanooga's commercial developers have claimed the festival's surrounding riverpark area for a privately operated complex with a hotel, offices, and an aquarium, its public availability for the festival is uncertain. This economic development became the primary goal of the festival's financial backers, a driving impulse that lay in part behind the economic exploitation of the original Riverbend Festival idea.
Several conflicting views of this use of the "art" of the festival can be defended. One could argue that this one festival was successful and that it reached its goal of making its location more meaningful to purchasers and thereby more valuable to its private investors. Or one could argue that selfish entrepreneurs captured a valuable public property and "deconsecrated" the people's park. Other interpretations can be advanced and defended. However, neither stated objectives nor arguable effects adequately probe the depths of the festival's multiple dimensions. For example, the deliberate intention of tying the festival to development of the water frontage(27) could have had a significance--a "textual" implication--much deeper than mere reward to private investors.
Overarching any specific "function" is the contextual "logic" of any complex signifying practice such as a festival. Logic in this sense is the system of principles underlying any art or science, rather than the more precise meaning of a science of correct reasoning. In this sense, the kindred entities of festival, carnival, and fair are a "logos," in the Greek sense of a combined form of word, speech, and discourse. The festival logos, then, provides "logodaedaly," a playing with "signs"--symbols or objects in close spatial and temporal proximity--functioning as a theater to transform meanings. This provides the festival forms's contextual logic of diversity, difference, chaos, disorder, inversion, nonsense. In all this the space exists for free play, for randomness, for unexpected outcomes. The festival provides a model of logic for accepting the arbitrariness of life; we learn to tolerate as normal the great range of diversity contained within its time and space.
"Function," then, is meant to signify that specific and particular action observed in an activity that connects it to its physical and imaginative environment. The special logical context of an action's function defines the activity, enabling identification not only by its purposes or effects alone. For instance, a tractor's steering wheel has the function of controlling the direction of the machine; within this mechanical structure's contextual logic, the steering wheel must be connected to at least one wheel. The machine's logic requires this "function" if any change in direction is possible.
Similarly, a festival's artistic director, general manager, or board chairperson controls its direction. This person (or persons) must be connected to those performance activities that point the festival in its particular direction. The evidence from the festivals examined is that the artistic director provides "precision" steering. The absence of either precise function, steering wheel or artistic director--both customarily present according to the current practice and logic of both structures--would invite attention to what, if any, alternative devices for direction setting are functioning. Awareness and naming of the "functioning" level of such features within a structure's logic makes possible a representation of the broader contextual logic in which various key devices or elements operate.
A deeper understanding of a festival's meaning and meaning-making process, then, comes from a semiotic representation of three interdependent qualities: intent, function, and effect. This critique of Chattanooga's Riverbend Festival and Charleston's Spoleto Festival U.S.A. applies this idea and its practical application. It is this idea of examining unnoticed functions that enables the observer to peer beyond idealistic or misleading intentions as well as accidental, random effect and to draw tentative conclusions about the signifying discourse of festivals.
This approach gives rise, for example, to the possibility mentioned above that festivals act as powerful integrating or segregating media, or as media that perform both these and other functions. Yet festival designers may have had no such idea in mind, and may even deny that festivals integrate or segregate disparate elements of a community, that festivals portray the desirability of social differences, or that they reinforce ethnic samenesses. As communication media, it may be that certain festivals speed up a surfacing of "new art," that is, "representations of new ways of seeing," even when planners are convinced the event is nothing more than a giant urban block party, as one Riverbend president claimed.(28)
A decoding of these patterns of functions can portray a "reality" formerly
"out of sight" in which both the modern as well as the Renaissance festival can
be seen, in British historian Roy Strong's metaphor, as a "theater of power."(29) Although the similarity of functions of fifteenth- and
twentieth century forms of festival practice is uncertain, Strong's analysis points to a
theater that combines various practices of power (economic, political, artistic, special
interest). This possible parallel suggests it is especially important to question the
nature of the interpretive "template" or "grid" or "contextual
logic" through which this theater imposes its power. The "functions
template" is one such grid that directs one's attention to "offstage"
forces, activities, and aims.
Perspectives and Semantic Framing
Various semiotic and structural analysis constructs provide the primary perspectives for development of a critical inquiry of festival practice. Eco, in particular, has offered a workable explanation of the mechanism of context as one of the multiple structural levels of festivals in terms of "overcoding, undercoding, and extracoding" operations:
Overcoded...entities float--so to speak--among the codes, on the threshold between convention and innovation. It is by a slow and prudent process that a society admits them to the ranks of the rules upon which it bases its own very raison d'être. Frequently a society does not recognize overcoded rules that in fact allow the social exchange of signs. A typical example is provided by the narrative rules, as outlined by Propp...the plot laws introduced by Propp were an abductive proposal that brought to light the existence of an overcoded language. These laws are now universally accepted as the items of a recognized narrative subcode.(30)
If festivals can be viewed as overcoded entities on the threshold between convention and innovation, an unrecognized rule-making operation simultaneously indexical, iconic, and symbolic that allows the social exchange of signs, then it is reasonable to ask whether potential "laws" of an accepted, recognized narrative subcode for festivals can be identified. As Eco has argued above, "Frequently a society does not recognize overcoded rules that in fact allow the social exchange of signs." Eco could have been speaking of festivals as "overcoded rules," "entities [that] float--so to speak--among the codes, on the threshold between convention and innovation. It is by a slow and prudent process that a society admits them to the ranks of the rules upon which it bases its own very raison d'être." This would lend support for a form of "Brechtian" theater that functions
as a political and social act whose goal seems both to place in question--or to counteract--the other form of theater [the Artaudian "metaphysical" theater], and to oppose and change actual social reality. From being an analysis of codes of action, indeed, it becomes an effort to produce real social praxis, and within a history for which the human individual as an authentic participant in the social collectivity will itself be responsible.(31)
The Nazi view of art and theater can be viewed in light of this perspective on the importance of "goals" and "purposes." The question, it seems, is not "whether" art forms have a purpose but rather "what" that purpose is. In a final note to his chapter on the theory of codes, Eco also points to what is a basic contention regarding festivals as meaning-making artistic contexts, or "circumstances":
But there is one aspect which is more interesting from the semiotic point of view, according to which the circumstance can become an intentional element of communication. If the circumstance helps one to single out the subcodes by means of which the messages are disambiguated this means that, rather than change messages or control their production, one can change their content by acting on the circumstances in which the message will be received. This is a `revolutionary' aspect of a semiotic endeavor. In an era in which mass communication often appears as the manifestation of a domination which makes sure of social control by planning the sending of messages, it remains possible (as in an ideal semiotic `guerilla warfare') to change the circumstances in the light of which the addressees will choose their own ways of interpretation. In opposition to a strategy of coding, which strives to render messages redundant in order to secure interpretation according to pre-established plans, one can trace a tactic of decoding where the message as expression form does not change but the addressee rediscovers his freedom of decoding.(32)
In summary, the festival theater can be seen as a deliberate framing device in which not only context, or "circumstance," but also texts and subtexts are in artistic free play, where participating spectators are "addressees" in potential opposition to "senders" (sponsors and performers) in a dramatic "semiotic guerilla war" in the time and space of the festival. A view of "homo ludens," "humans at play," as yet has no place in this general construction of what appears to be little more than a Darwinian "theater of power." However, a space must be reserved in the concluding remarks for evidence that a festival's "multi-functionality" also can be a time and space for no other purpose but play, pleasure, romance, "jouissance."
For no other reason than the several millions of dollars that have been spent on the Charleston and Chattanooga festivals since their beginning, this issue could be regarded as worthy of careful study. Also, the shape, form, and evolution of the "empty" urban theater deserves thoughtful attention as, in Menotti's phrase, an "art form in itself." However, beyond the economic and physical environment is the interplay of the force of one or several individuals' festival vision with the forces of resistance and reaction. This process, in Charleston and Chattanooga at least, was a behind-the-scenes, winner-take-all struggle for dominance.
In such an extreme set of oppositions lies the interest and value of comparing
Charleston's and Chattanooga's tale of two festivals. Possibly the narrative reflects a
larger "tale of two cities" and how other forgotten or
repressed festival stories were still-born or aborted. That story, however, would require
social science and economic methodology not yet developed, and would need not only an
enormous budget but also a nonexistent, yet emerging conviction, that the
"festival" is important enough to justify significant public and private
analysis.
Implications of Festivals Viewed
As a "Place of the Different"
In light of this introductory framing of the subject and several approaches to it, Strong's view of the "mirroring" function of a Renaissance festival takes on new significance:
Revamped medieval romance, the imagery of Sacred Empire, of Christianity and classical myth and history provided the absolutist monarch with an encyclopedia of universally understood symbols with which to promote his rule.(33)
"Promoting his rule" is a much more interventionist function of a festival theater than merely presenting "allegories" of the times. So also do contemporary festivals provide state, corporation, university, and church with an "encyclopedia of universally understood symbols" that compose the contemporary American city festival's "mise-en-scéne" and that actively "promote" the wishes and desires of civic "rulers." What the overall consequences of such an encyclopedia of symbolic signs, if it exists at all, might be is a matter that would require significant research resources and new methodology for the numerous festival materials and studies available for review. The power of the new technological "theaters" of public media in contemporary society is such that the potential new insights into the imagistic nature of human communication processes may justify the costs.
The well-documented history of forms of theater from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Artaud to Brecht to Tyrone Guthrie is evidence of the importance of the physical element in the dramatic meaning-making process. Salzburg opened in 192O with an outdoor performance of Hofmannsthal's Everyman morality play on a temporary stage in front of the main cathedral. Like Menotti, the director saw the town as potential theater.
If a society believes that such "make believe" literally makes belief, then a theoretical door is ajar through which can be glimpsed the possibility of new insights into the nature and function of the creative and communication processes by which the "social exchange of signs" occurs in festivals and related genres. If no sign exists out of context, then attention must be focused on the actual mechanisms of the sign-context relationship and the possibility of a shift from a one-way, ethnocentric sender/receiver communication model to a helical, multi-dimensional, contextual reception model. Attempts at construction of a "semiotic of festival," an "overall picture" of festivals, as Strong suggested, should produce syntheses that will increase understanding of basic aspects of the "stupendous development" of festivals and of their resurgence in shaping as well as in mirroring their eras as truly unusually powerful "signs of the times." Or, as one drama scholar has worded the issue of the "nature and function" of a "festival theater" so precisely:
The [Brechtian theater]...goes toward a social realism and a socio-political practice. It proceeds from an analysis of social (and other) "codes" as found in positivism and capitalism, toward their setting into crisis. This eventually leads to a theatre as a political and social act whose goal seems both to place into question--or to counteract--the other form of theatre, and to oppose and change actual social reality.(34)
The evidence that follows suggests that the modern arts festival, exemplified by Spoleto Festival U.S.A., has evolved into just such a Brechtian theater with political, social, environmental, economic, and theological implications so powerful that Eco's term of an emerging "guerilla semiotic warfare" is no understatement. The written and recollected intentions of the founders of the two festivals in Charleston and Chattanooga leave little doubt that both festivals were a "socio-political...effort to oppose and change actual social reality." In the Riverbend case, however, the initial emergence of a Brechtian theater was suppressed by the use of a more dominant form of the very same ideological practice that its founders intended to "place into question." If these views appear paradoxical, they represent the actual events described in the following two chapters. They suggest that a broader semiotic perspective is required for extended analysis of their meanings and implications.
This new but very old social theater could be called "Menottian," the reasons for which should be clear in the following chapter. Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti's festivals appear to be a new genre of theatrical practice incorporating the Aristotelian "illusory" stage, the Artaudian "metaphysical, imagistic" dramatic event, and the Brechtian arena of "political and social action." That this metaphor has the plurality of a three-ring circus is understandable in view of the differences contained within the festival theater. It is possible that festival is the general historical class of which theater is a sub-genre; however, little festival theory exists to support this claim and thus drama theory must suffice for this initial study. The possibility that the festival is a primary class of social practice is suggested by noting that in my newspaper clipping files on festivals there is a Festival of Circuses, but to date no circus of festivals has come to my attention.
The Spoleto Festival U.S.A. had a small circus during 1986 and 1988, a circus enjoyed by children and at the same time by attentive adults. It was a delightful parody of the nineteenth-century "political" circuses that told immigrants how lucky they were to be Americans. In 1986 everyone laughed with the children when four horses balked at coming through the tent door all at once and lost their riders; only later did the audience learn that this was not part of the script. Planned or random, it worked, an expression of what Charles Wadsworth termed "art as organized surprise," where even the mishaps appear to be part of the "play."
Too much in too small a space, or the inverse, often is a source of the tension that provokes laughter. I suspect Maestro Menotti has not attempted to articulate fully and publicly in his Italian, American, and Australian festival communities his vision of a new festival theater form of civic opera, in which all these small "worlds" are a living theater that has so much artistic diversity in so many small spaces, or so much commercial sameness in one relatively small space, as evolved in Chattanooga.
As the next chapter on Menotti's festival in Charleston with its forerunner in Spoleto, Italy, describes, Menotti and his brilliant associates have left some signs along the trail for others to decode in learning how his festivals create so much pleasure for those who prepare and make the "pilgrimage" Tyrone Guthrie recommended in 1953 for those coming to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.(35)
NOTES
CHAPTER II
SPOLETO FESTIVAL U.S.A.:
WHERE FOOTLIGHTS CAST NO SHADOWS
Menotti's New Theater
The development of Menotti's three festivals in Italy, America, and Australia is a cultural story of major importance.(36) 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.)(37)
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. 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 (Appendix A) 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,"(38) 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.(39) 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.
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."(40)
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 festival was 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.
Functions of a "Serious" Festival
The festival's general triadic framework has been presented: a place, an ideal, a force. Yet a festival is difficult to represent, as noted earlier, by its visible features. A specific central idea, a vivid framing device, is needed that places a festival's complexity in a new perspective, a frame that provides insight into the basic nature, function, and meanings of practices such as Menotti's Spoleto festivals.
One such dominant image is available from Stratford's first artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie. To what did he attribute the festival's success? His reflections about the first 1953 Stratford, Ontario, festival came soon after directing the internationally acclaimed productions of Richard III and All's Well That Ends Well under the new tent with its unusual thrust stage. This was "a new kind of theatre...built for the new manner of production which was practised there...," Robertson Davies wrote in the preface to Renown at Stratford.(41) Guthrie addressed the issue of the value of a festival itself:
In conclusion I want to urge the advantage of the Theatre Festival over just having a theatre which works week in, week out, year after year....
This is where the Festival comes in. It makes attendance at the play something of a Pilgrimage. The wise Pilgrim will not be in too much of a hurry. Masterpieces demand respect. One must give to them at least the same attention as to a serious business conference. One must be prepared to do some homework beforehand, some meditation afterwards.
A Festival should offer, as Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Stratford, England, do, opportunities to absorb great works of art in an appropriate atmosphere, with other people of similar taste bent on the same errand. For this reason small, countrified towns, where life is comparatively calm, make the best Festival Cities.(42)
The festival itself can become a community's "powerful, dominating imagistic template" for an entire year, much like Bakhtin's argument that in a festival form "the utopian truth is enacted in life itself" and "for a short time this truth becomes to a certain extent a real existing force."(43)
A "serious" festival functions as much more than a device for the development of increased tourism, new business, or civic image enhancement (although often these are its mixed blessings). Guthrie's idea of a festival "functioning"--whether intended or unintended--to make attendance at an arts event a "serious" experience akin to a "pilgrimage" with "some homework beforehand, some meditation afterwards" points toward a deeper significance of the potential nature and function of the festival theater, one with theological overtones of belief-making power. And his sensitivity to the value of a suitable festival city as a sort of great cathedral, one where a festival could be the "peak of the year," explains Menotti's strong preference for Charleston's eighteenth-century shell over other Southeastern American cities. Here the "urban" space was less filled, more open for the "new," yet "comparatively calm."
In considering why Menotti's festival found a home in Charleston, the importance of the "empty" urban "contextual" frame cannot be overemphasized. In the essay, "Center-City, Empty Center," in Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes saw Tokyo as offering the opposite of the typical Western city:
...in accord with the very movement of Western metaphysics, for which every center is
the site of truth, the center of our cities is always full: a marked
site, it is here that the values of civilization are gathered and condensed: spirituality
(churches), power (offices), money (banks), merchandise (department stores), language
(agoras: cafés and promenades) [emphasis mine]: to go downtown or to the
center-city is to encounter the social "truth," to participate in the proud
plentitude of "reality."(44)
Guthrie and Barthes agree with the notion of the essential character of the physical city. Guthrie's "too busy" is Barthes' "always full," a city of presences, not absences where there is "room" for the new and different to co-exist with the old and the same.
Meaning in the Western city, functioning as an ideogram, is condensed at the center, where, predictably, there is little space for the new, for renewed meaning. Yet festival "pilgrims" seek the sacred "festival space," a place and time for "some homework beforehand, some meditation afterwards." Significantly, Barthes groups language with "agoras," from the Athenian chief marketplace or public square, and "cafés and promenades." That one downtown center site holds the "social truth" became the central idea of Chattanooga's festival, entirely the opposite of the ideogram of Charleston's multiple "realities" and "truths" that emerge from its many indoor and outdoor "empty spaces." One may ask, then, where and how are, in Barthes' words, "the values of Western civilization gathered and condensed?" Some possible answers to this significant matter are found in the stories of the creation of the Chattanooga and Charleston festivals (a third ideogram is found in the example of the Chautauqua Institution, discussed in Chapter IV).
It is from this perspective of the festival as "ideogram," a "writing" that directly represents a set of ideas and relationships, that Christopher Hunt's provocative suggestion of an arts festival functioning as a "disguised" religious festival urging us to "artistic devotion" strikes close to the heart of the nature and function of any "serious" festival. Like Northrop Frye's sense of the Christian Bible in The Great Code,(45) these festivals can function as a community's imagistic "great code," even as an international "great code," similar to what Roy Strong described as a Renaissance "encyclopedia of universally understood symbols."(46) Like the great religious documents, to which festivals are related historically as a visible expression of beliefs, the best are few in number and exist in very special places. These festivals are "special" as much for their place as for their programming, as Christopher Hunt has pointed out in his programming notes:
It is no accident that the great arts festivals of the world--Salzburg, Edinburgh, Aix-en-Provence, Dubrovnik, Prague--all happen in cities with historic charm, a kind of architectonic intimacy that creates a context in which the `willing suspension of disbelief' can most easily happen.
An initial concept of the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. "ideogram" is needed, one evolving from the general premises described previously, but one more directly focused on one primary function of a successful festival theater such as Spoleto Festival U.S.A. It is this: "Menotti's festival theater can be viewed as a cathedral for the making of belief, a "church" in itself where various "fringe" festivals spring up as carnival opposition." This idea of a festival "church" was offered by an experienced festival artistic director and arts critic, Christopher Hunt, in introductory comments for the 1981 Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Official Souvenir Program:
Spoleto U.S.A. is rather different. The variety and range of these programs reflect not just one art form but a spectrum of artistic experience. It also happens in a place peculiarly suited to the creation of a special atmosphere, a place to which visitors come for days or a week at a time and not just for the evening; a place where the residents feel a certain pride in the occasion....Charleston is such a place, and it is in the combination of environment, identity of audience purpose, and varied programming that its special claim to distinction lies.
...it is the context that needs remarking--and the significant fact that the selection of programs is unified, and not the polyglot recipe of many impresarios....Not that everyone wants or needs feel obliged to have their horizons expanded: a truly festive atmosphere allows one to choose between the simplest level of pleasurable response to any event, and the most profound. Art need not only be about Ultimate Truths, nor should we be too earnestly devoted to it. The religious origin of festivals--whether the Dionysian feasts of ancient Greece or the medieval church festivals of Europe--does sometimes seem to have made a disguised come-back in those who urge us to artistic devotion.(47)
Is Spoleto Charleston the "context" for a "disguised" religious festival urging us to "artistic devotion"? A tentative answer would have to be, "yes, but more...." The significance of context was noted in a recent collection of essays on the festival:
Folklorists and anthropologists have been increasingly aware of the importance of context in the events they investigate, both the immediate performative context, and the abstract context of the worldview, with its set of norms and values that ultimately affect all social phenomena in a culture.(48)
This broader contextual perspective depends on gaining a clear understanding of a
festival's beginning, its "story of origin," even if the memories and a few
documents of its founders and opponents and later key leaders are the only presently
reliable available sources of what happened and why.
Three Basic Elements: Artistic Director,
Empty Space, Purposes
An initial set of categories devised for Spoleto Festival U.S.A. constructs a basis for contrast with the Chattanooga festival. The following table briefly summarizes several key features of the 198O Festival, which were described in the May 198O Chattanooga Times newspaper article in which Spoleto U.S.A. first came to the author's attention.
NAME: Spoleto Festival U.S.A. (198O)
TYPE: annual multi-arts festival with parallel city-sponsored Piccolo Festival
MODEL: Spoleto Festival, Spoleto, Italy
PURPOSE: avant garde showcase of new art, principally performance works
RESULTS: city turned into cultural mecca, setting for premier works, worldwide acclaim, $25 million into economy, model of town arts festival, expanded local cultural horizons, turned city into art form itself, tell the world about Charleston's beauty and ambience
PROGRAMMING: debut of an Arthur Miller play The American Clock, Bellini's opera Sonnambula, film, dance, choral, jazz, country, jazz, chamber music, folk music, art exhibitions, crafts
LOCATION AND THEATERS: Galliard city auditorium, 17th century Dock St. Theater, many other downtown locations, some outside at College of Charleston, Middleton Place plantation
BUDGET: $1.6 million in 198O
INCOME SOURCES: ticket admissions, public and private donations
DURATION: seventeen days
TIME: late May through early June
SPONSOR: National Endowment for the Arts, City of Charleston, Festival of Two Worlds Foundation in New York City, foundations, corporations, individual donors
MANAGEMENT: local board headed by College of Charleston president
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: Gian Carlo Menotti
WORKERS: paid staff, volunteers
AUDIENCE: 1OO,OOO visitors
AUDIENCE ACCESS: traditional ticketed events; free public activities
RELATED EVENTS: finale at Middleton Plantation
FOOD: restaurants, booths at plantation
REACTION: worldwide critical acclaim
PROFIT: none, guarantors covered substantial deficit(49)
Following Propp's approach, the selection of three of these categories--the human force
of the artistic director, the empty space of the place, and the purpose of the idea--was
derived largely from their repetitive appearance in the transcribed interviews. These
"stories" are beginning points for selective exploration of these two festivals.
In their briefest form, these categories can be posed as simple questions: Why Menotti?
Why Charleston? Why a festival?
Artistic Director: Why Menotti?
The value of Menotti's contribution as artistic director of the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. was emphasized in all interviews in 1986 and 1988. As artistic director, Maestro Gian Carlo Menotti generated and commissioned original performing and visual art works. Yet it was his often repeated conception of "seeing the city as an art form in itself" and literally using empty city structures for the birth of new art that proved most innovative. During the 1988 Spoleto festival, for example, a parking garage near the Dock Street Theater was emptied during the festival to become an art gallery; an empty real estate office became a nightspot; a vacant store became a restaurant.
At the very beginning in 1958 in Italy, Menotti first planned his chamber music concerts in a very old church in Spoleto, a small village in the Umbrian Province near where Hannibal crossed the Alps, one largely left out of the process and effects of industrialization. Charles Wadsworth, chamber music host and pianist since 1959 for the Italian festival, and since 1977 for the Charleston festival, pointed out:
Menotti said in 1958 there might not be a very large audience, but that the attendance was not as important as providing an environment in which the musicians enjoyed playing and felt as free as possible to perform and to create the best possible music that was in them. These chamber music concerts proved to be one of the most delightful parts of the entire concept of Spoleto in Italy and Charleston. Now the chamber events sell out quickest of all the festival activities and remain an integral part of the unique Menotti vision. Menotti also made it clear that the emphasis was to be on young, new, unknown artists who would be given the opportunity to perform before a critical audience and that it was important that these talented musicians feel the festival was as much for them as for the audience.(50)
This continuing emphasis on the value of the artist and the festival as an educational and enjoyable experience for young and unknown performers is one key to the critical success of Charleston's festival. In this educational role, a qualified, effective artistic director was the primary source of energy and vision in the Charleston and Salzburg festivals, which, like other serious town arts festivals, are as much summer schools for artists as summer diversions for audiences. These had evolved out of the imagination of successful artists like Menotti and Reinhardt. Chattanooga was not allowed to have someone in such a position at the outset of its creative process for reasons that will be made clear in the next chapter. It seems, therefore, that the absence or presence of an artistic director is a key to gaining entrance into a broader consideration of what a festival is and does in its home community and in the wider environment.
Understanding the functions and individual views of the artistic director (or directors) is the primary key to understanding the nature and function of a festival. Asked what he would advise someone starting a festival, Theodore S. Stern, the first board chairman, cited Menotti's special role:
I have been asked about starting a festival many, many times. It comes down to this. You need a Menotti, who's so unusual. He's the only person I know who knows all the arts....He knows music. Menotti directs, he's a director, producer--he's a genius, and that's why we have a problem in trying to decide what happens after Menotti....Menotti--every orchestra knows him, the theater people know him, the dance people, the opera people, the music people.
What makes the festival so successful? In three words, Gian Carlo Menotti. His ability,
number one, to direct, his knowledge of all of the arts--he always gets the visual artists
to do the poster....The only poster ever done by Henry Moore, the sculptor in England, was
made for Spoleto U.S.A., because of his friendship with Menotti.(51)
Charles Wadsworth, who began with Menotti in 1959 in Italy, recalled Menotti's early contribution in bringing the force of "art power" to the small village of Spoleto:
Menotti, as he set out to present a festival, and for me what made it the most exciting festival that I know about, set out to produce a festival which he was very well aware would not be a sure fire hit. He said if I'm going to be like Edinburgh or Salzburg where all I do is bring in great guest artists, well known orchestras presenting repertoires that they know are going to be successful, this is not something I'm at all interested in. I feel that the festival must be a creative festival, that it must be willing to take chances, it must be willing to accept the fact of failure, and out of this kind of experimentation you're going to get things which are much more exciting in the long run....
Gian Carlo from the very beginning was taking chances on artists who were
unknown....But there was an overall artistic view of what was necessary to give a special
profile to the festival. That came from Gian Carlo and his imagination, his faith in
brilliant young people, and in the creative arts. The Spoleto Festival as we know it would
not have been what we know unless there had been specifically Gian Carlo.
The "overall" artistic view bringing a "special profile" was that of extreme diversity of programming that would bring thousands of appreciative arts lovers to the small village. An obvious question was whether arts festival, or any "serious" festival, could be produced without an artistic director. "Not successfully," said Wadsworth:
It could be carried off maybe as a financially successful venture by a businessman but
to me the festival should be much more than that. It should have some very strong artistic
point of view that you're trying to get across. I think you need a creative mind to do
that....I would have no interest whatsoever in taking part in a festival which was run by
a businessman with just a slight speaking acquaintance with the arts. Those people are the
kind we want on the board of directors, who can say, "You're the artist....We have to
raise the money....We will tell you how much we can raise and how much you have to spend.
You can dream and tell us how much you'd like." Then you meet somewhere in the
middle.
Finding the "middle" ground, he suggested, was the heart of the problem.(52)
Gian Carlo throughout the years has been a tough one for business managers to deal with because he has dreamed very big at times with budgets that go way, way out of range....It depends on what your aims are....Art is organized surprises....There's a young man named Joshua Bell...he came here last year at 17, and he's going to set the world on fire. He'll be playing today [at the Dock Street Theater] a huge piece, which is a very unusual work by Chausonne, a concerto for violin, piano, and string quartet; he's never played it [publicly] until this morning....Now that sort of electricity communicates itself. So, that's what the festival means to me.
...I took a part about four or five summers ago in Miami in the International Contemporary Arts Festival. It was run by a man who has a great he