It has been more than three decades since Gian Carlo Menotti transformed the hilltop village of Spoleto, Italy into the site of the Festival dei due Mondi. Spoleto becomes a world unto itself every summer when musicians, dancers, actors, directors, choreographers, and composers from all lover the globe come together for seventeen days, performing classics as well as innovative new works.
In 1976 the Festival of Two Worlds gained new meaning when Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA, an annual sister festival held in Charleston, South Carolina in the late spring. Like its Italian counterpart, the American festival offers more than one hundred performances of nearly two dozen productions. If that were not enough, Charleston's Office of Cultural Affairs sponsors a parallel festival, Piccolo Spoleto, which presented an additional seven hundred events this past spring.
From May 26 through June 11, all of Charleston turned into one giant stage as the Boston Ballet, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane & Company, Laurie Anderson, ISO, and Cyrano! discovered Spoleto Festival USA.
Civic Pride
Southern matrons sighed with pleasure as the curtain rose on the Boston Ballet in pristine formation, ready to perform for George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco and Fernando Bujones' restaging of Marius Petipa's Raymonda. The bright enthusiasm onstage matched the audience's civic pride at having successfully lured a big-city ballet company to South Carolina. The audience forgot about classical purity not being Boston's forte as the likes of Maurice Bejart's Le Sacre de Printemps and William Forsythe's Lovesongs hit the stage.
Printemps treats prime rituals; Lovesongs explores contemporary romance, laying bare many of the same primal fears and desires. As convoluted and almost impossibly fast-paced as Bejart and Forsythe's choreography were, Boston's dancers never faltered. The pieces demand absolute commitment; Geoffrey Rhue, Carla Stallings, and Shawn Mahoney indeed danced as if their very lives hung in balance.
Three blocks away, another dancer performed with unbridled intensity. Bill T. Jones choreographed Absence as a response to the 1988 death of his lover and partner of seventeen years, Arnie Zane. Through dancing, Jones attempted to alleviate the pain of his loss.
Tangled Emotions
Absence begins with a warning--a glimpse of another world, a place beyond reason, beyond death--before slipping into a humorous narrative. Jones plays host, introducing the audience to a family party complete with joyous toasts, old snapshots, and drunken missteps. The audience is drawn into the community when one of the members is cast loose.
The music of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete stops. The dancing stops. Time stops. Arthur Aviles, the chosen son, suddenly stiffens into a spread-eagled statue and abruptly collapses. Jones reacts with a solo dance that alternates between despair and hilarity.
The intensity of his performance is both frightening and moving, dissolving into a final tableau
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