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Chapter 3

Force

Artistic Director: Why Menotti?

Gian Carlo Menotti

Although the attributes of Charleston itself provided a forum in which Spoleto could exist, Menotti as artistic director is inextricably tied to the form of festival that came to play in that space. He was Spoleto's "I," the "imagining creative I" who named Charleston as the bare stage for his theater. 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. [Charles S. Wadsworth, interview tape recorded during chamber series break at Charleston's Dock Street Theater during the Spoleto Festival, May 1986.]

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 section. 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.

The eleven Spoleto Festival U.S.A. posters form a unique representation of the evolution of this festival and its unpredictable offerings. Each poster differs widely.

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.

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 to the Spoleto festival 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.

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 head for business and a wonderful man in the world of opera....But it was a struggle. The prices were too high for people in Miami to pay. There wasn't the basis for cultural interest. So it was a matter of the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong people.

The new, the different, the risky, the experimental, the failure, the creative, the unsafe, the chancy, the unknown, the special, the unordinary, the young, the big dream, the surprises, the electricity--all of Wadsworth's key words point to his experience with a successful festival that is, to paraphrase him, "a matter of the right place at the right time with the right people."

If, as Wadsworth suggested, art is organized surprise, the administrative director who does much of the organizing could be expected to have a special insight into the practical workings of Menotti's "seventeen-day performance work." Although not involved directly in Spoleto Festival U.S.A. until early 1986, General Manger Nigel Redden viewed the role of the artistic director as providing an aesthetic focus that makes the arts function "as a means rather than an end":

The real strength of this festival is for better or worse people have agreed that Gian Carlo Menotti is the artistic director, that it has an artistic focus, and that he should be in charge of this thing....He makes compromises, he does things that he doesn't want to do, but he's enough of a realist and enough of an artist to keep the whole thing going.

Redden focused on the reliance on a single mind, a potentially dangerous political pattern if participatory processes are valued. Modern consensus management methods and jazz or chamber music follow a mode in which the steering function is less visible and more broadly shared.

It is the coherence question, that the artistic director, that is, a single mind, can give the festival a coherence that it might not have otherwise....Not necessarily that an artistic director has to be involved in every aspect of what's going on....I think that a festival, in order to be significant, has to have some idea. Usually the easiest way to embody that idea is through the artistic director. And it should be an artistic idea, not an extraneous idea....

I think a festival that has an artistic sense has an opportunity to be better than the other because it's serving. I mean there's a kind of integrity that comes with that which can't come with something that has nonartistic motives but nonetheless achieves them through the arts. I mean the arts become a means rather than an end.

One inevitable issue of the single mind leadership model was the dilemma of the festival's direction after Gian Carlo Menotti was no longer connected with it. Redden predicted:

...I think we'll be a very different festival. Because I think that this is more malleable than most organizations. It really can be very different from one year to the next. There are few things that are fixed about it, except that we've going to stay in Charleston. We're going to be a summer festival. We're probably not going to be over seventeen days long. We're going to be high arts, whatever that means, and that can mean jazz or circuses or a lot of other things. But it means the arts.

I don't know what it would be like after Gian Carlo. I think Gian Carlo sees festivals as a...I think he's an impresario, that's what he feels his role in life is...I think he's an extraordinary impresario. He's been an extraordinarily successful composer, but I think he could have been a...lot more so if he hadn't done these festivals.

Redden's suggestion that Menotti could have been an even more successful composer "if he hadn't done these festivals" is offset by the possibility that the festivals have become major aesthetic compositions, Wilsonian performance works that are new dramas in renewed town theaters. Redden's emphasis on the value of a single mind in producing artistic coherence suggests the uniqueness of the Spoleto festivals in that they are not primarily the work of the volunteer, untrained civic committees that shape so many commercial town festivals. That is not to say that the volunteer spirit is not vital to such events but rather to emphasize that its spirit receives a powerful impetus from the vision of an artist such as Menotti.

General manager Colin Sturm, anticipating the opening of his first Spoleto festival in Melbourne in September 1986, emphasized the special economic value of an artistic director who is skilled in the art of entertainment:

You've got two types of festivals. One which is a carnival, summer festival out in the open, marching girls, sports, swimming, stores selling things in the street...That can be done reasonably cheaply.

But when you start talking about a festival that means the use of venues, halls, theaters, bringing people in from out-of-state, entertainments, and so on, you're then getting into the entertainment business. The entertainment business is very expensive and very specialized, and, if it's going to work well, almost needing a genius at business. You were saying that you hadn't had an artistic director [at Riverbend]. The whole point of having an artistic director is to have somebody who is essentially uninterested in the financial end of things, who is looking purely at what is going to work in a general entertainment sense. And you then have...someone who is a business manager. Now without the combination of the two I think you run a risk.

...Because unless you can sell the tickets, you are not going to have a festival that will last very long. So you have to look at your market place.

The special power of the artistic director to shape the festival's aesthetic form and institutionalize its pattern drew the attention of public relations director David Rawle, the long-time salesperson for Menotti's Charleston venue:

I think Spoleto would continue to thrive without Menotti because part of his genius is that he has been able to institutionalize Spoleto. It is now larger than any individual by his own admission. I think it is a great tribute to him that he has been able to create that kind of institution.

Whether Menotti has been able to institutionalize his festivals is one of the more important questions that his vision of festival leaves unanswered. The maestro said at a 1988 press conference that he was satisfied with the present mixture of art forms, particularly with the avant garde programming, which he felt had become better accepted by audiences in recent years.

Rawle suggested that Menotti's festival ideal of primary emphasis on an art of juxtaposed programming and venues created a unique urban environment:

I think that he felt that art was, in his words, considered too often as an after-dinner mint and that it ought to be the main meal, the main course. One way of making it be so was to create a festival in which an entire community could be immersed. It is difficult during the festival to pick up a newspaper, talk to an individual, visit a shop, or watch television or listen to radio without having a sense of Spoleto's presence. This is a joyous celebration of the arts and the festival form provides it.

Menotti's special function as artistic director is seen in the image Rawle evoked of bringing an entire community to an arts feast for a "joyous celebration of the arts" as an ultimate end. The festival's forms itself provide a complete immersion, a term suggesting the religious overtones of a serious festival noted by Tyrone Guthrie and Christopher Hunt. As a "market place," an "agora for artists and audiences," what is the festival form but a theater of differences with, as Bakhtin said, "an absence of clearly established footlights"? The multi-colored lights of the Christmas tree are festive, someone observed (the Christmas lights observation was made by an Atlanta ceramic jewelry artist, Dorothy Kimball. She observed a string of colored lights on my 1989 makeshift Christmas "tree," a large palm plant. The comment triggered this idea of the festive nature of differences in a more general sense). If all the lights were one color, red perhaps, the response would be possibly interesting or pretty but probably not festive. The fest most often appears as the root word of social, religious, or pleasurable activities that mark a time and space of differences from the routine of ordinary life. 

Tension springs from Menotti's idea of differences, contrasts, oppositions, inversions, pluralities, diversities, assortments, miscellanies, varieties, medleys, divergences, variances. Unlike the effect of modes of analysis that compress meaning and relationships to fewer and fewer symbols, the effect of what is festive and alive is the expansion to multiplicity, even to seemingly meaningless diversity. It is this illusion of uniqueness that endows any festival with its appearance of endless variety of forms and content. Yet the tension of unlike entities in proximity, as in musical dissonance, creates interest and gives pain mixed with pleasure to the eye and ear. It is the function of an artistic director to mingle and blend the elements at hand without fearing or rejecting contradiction, inconsistencies, the comfort of sameness, the familiar, and the nonthreatening.

Logodaedaly gives a more precise sense of the idea for the complex cultural practice of festival contrasted in the examples of difference in Charleston and sameness in Chattanooga. The kindred entities of festival, carnival, and fair are a "logos," in the Greek sense of a combining form of discourse. The distinctive festival logos is logodaedaly, a playing not only with words but also with other artificial and natural signs. These can be any symbol or object, all signs in the Peircian sense, in close spatial and temporal proximity in which a public festival theater functions contextually to transform meanings. Logodaedaly expresses the festival's contextual logic of diversity, difference, juxtaposition, inversion, and opposition.

In the Oxford English Dictionary sense, a logodaedalist is an "inventor of words," or "signs," in the extended sense. From this view, Gian Carlo Menotti functions as a logodaedalist in the Spoleto festival productions. At festival time, he is head of a temporary state of logocracy, or a "community or system of government in which words [signs] are the ruling powers" (OED). In Menotti's logocracy the space exists for free play, for randomness, for unexpected outcomes, from personal risk of exposure to the never-before-seen. Menotti's festival theater provides a model of logodaedaly where cultural and other differences are presented as normal within the wide range of diversity contained within the festival's time and space.

In summary, the comments from Spoleto Festival U.S.A. officials quoted above and in other materials suggest the crucial contribution of an artistic director in shaping a festival. "Menotti," and his message and vision, are mentioned frequently; the value of individual contribution cannot be diminished. The artistic director is performing the essential function of the "I" in Brooks' study of the theatrically created empty space. Regardless of the particular goals, it is the existence of this function that endows the festival with its potential integrity as an end in itself, something other than a summer carnival alone, valuable though this may be for certain community needs. Paradoxically, the artistic integrity mentioned by Redden may produce significant economic benefits that greatly exceed productions of a more commercial aim.

That this is not the normal businessman's view of the ends and means of art is noted by Constance Hardinge in "The Artistic Director" from the National Association of Regional Ballet handbook for new ballet board members:

Basically our boards should be responsible for all legal and organizational activities, for fund raising, ticket sales and public relations. We [artistic directors] are responsible for everything else....Opinion and advice should always be sought from those who are knowledgeable, but the final word must always be the artistic director's. In this area there is often a lack of clarity and problems arise [emphasis mine]....In the constant daily crises we face it isn't easy to remember our real purpose. We are the link that holds illusion and reality together for future generations [emphasis mine].

Artists and their artistic directors, as "links holding illusion and reality together for future generations," apparently provide a forceful directive function not often experienced by the ordinary arts patron or board member. That influential Charlestonians, after an intense struggle, welcomed the contributions of Menotti, that they shared their civic power to such an extent with him as a critical influence, is in retrospect an extraordinary historical event.

These dramatic Spoleto productions, born out of a sensitive artist's response to an empty space, evolve into powerful meaning-making devices that none can avoid during their run nor completely escape before and after. Like Christmas and the Fourth of July, and other great cultural festive rituals, the reach of their symbolism cannot be blocked from awareness without deliberate social isolation. It is in the interplay of the "I" as artistic director, the bare stage of the empty urban form, and serious, purposeful ideas that these festive theaters of power are shaped into a place for aesthetic play.

Why Not "a Menotti" at Riverbend?

In the same way that Spoleto is the festival it is because of a strong artistic director from the festival's inception, the form of festival which the Riverbend festival settled into can be seen as the result of the absence of a similar personality. In an effort to emulate Spoleto's success and as indicated in this excerpt from the Riverbend festival proposal, it was the clear intent of the originating believers and dreamers to incorporate an artistic director firmly within the process of planning the Riverbend festival:

[Artistic Director]: Much will depend on the personality and vision of the artistic director. The selection of this individual is the key factor in achieving artistic and financial success. We suggest someone equal in stature to Gian Carlo Menotti, artistic director of Spoleto Festival in Charleston....Rather than attempting to do the work of the artistic director, which involves balancing appropriate programming, availability of guest artists and groups, and budgetary realities, we are attaching a copy of the Spoleto calendar as an example of what is working well now in Charleston and with modification could work here. (author's Riverbend materials.)

A thematic, selective analysis that focuses attention on one or a few repeated concerns reflected in private documents, the available public record, and personal experience is valuable in illustrating the opening of ideological and physical space for such a new, different meaning and practice of festival. From a chronological outline of recorded proposals and meetings leading up to the Riverbend Festival, and following it, one repetitive issue insists upon attention: the presence or absence of Guthrie's type of serious art and artists within a festival. This was a major issue in both the Charleston and Chattanooga productions.

The need for an artistic director was included in the first document that outlined the philosophy and approach to a festival on May 5, 1981, when a $1,000,000 "Celebration of Togetherness" festival was proposed to a local foundation.  I will long remember that afternoon when Mickey Robbins and I enjoyed the spring sunshine and the limitless possibilities of "going first class" while sitting in his backyard to draft a proposal for the foundation. We alternated in taking notes as each of us put our dreams on paper. Freed of mundane financial concerns, we dreamed big, as all the Riverbend leaders have done since that time.

The ideological struggle between "art for a few" and "art for the many" began at this point. Some of the authors of this proposal argued that a few artists could put together a first class festival while others argued that input from many people was needed if Chattanooga were to have a successful town arts festival. This crucial issue was not resolved as late as 1988, when a comprehensive evaluation of the Riverbend Festival was conducted.

On June 30, the idea of beginning with an artistic director--a key symbol of aesthetic purposes--was actively resisted by the executive director of the foundation (by far the dominant foundation in the city, with assets of approximately one hundred million dollars at that time). The director specified in a letter to the initial four-person board of directors that "the hiring of an artistic director at this time would be a serious mistake." The letter said in part:

As Sidney's list indicated, the desire to hire an artistic director is a priority for Friends of the Festival. Yet the actual discussion on that point centered around the Foundation's willingness or encouragement in having you approach other foundations to secure funds to hire that individual; that seems like a good step to take at the proper time. What I failed to address yesterday is my very strong opinion that the hiring of an artistic director at this time would be a serious mistake. I believe that two things, at least, must precede such a move. First, the planning and feasibility study must be completed and its recommendations and implications must be studied thoroughly. Second, but occurring simultaneously, it is imperative that the Board of Friends of the Festival be expanded, broadened and rather dramatically diversified.

While it would appear that actions must begin now in order to ensure that a festival take place in 1982, we greatly prefer that your actions proceed on a logical and orderly basis which will ensure that a festival, once created, exists on an annual basis for a number of years. To touch all of the necessary bases properly might--or might not--take quite a while. [The June 30, 1981, letter from Deaderick C. Montague was addressed to Frank M. Robbins III, with copies to Nelson Irvine, Sidney Hetzler, and Gianni Longo; it is in the author's Riverbend archives.]

The original idea of creating an artistic festival with a qualified artistic director, which was approved formally in November by seminar participants and consultants, had hit a solid barrier to its evolving artistic nature.

To the  group, later meant too late. There seemed no alternative except to drop the search for an artistic director until funds as well as support were assured. It was as if the curtain fell before the play began. It seems logical that members of the group should have advised the foundation that the project was impossible without an artistic director's input at the very beginning of the creative process. But this was not done; it was a significant omission and error of judgment.

Apparently the intense desire to have some kind of festival blinded me to the actual political situation. Hindsight suggests the imperative "board diversification" tone of language, for example, overruled the committee's independent judgment at this moment. Also, except in our few meetings, little continuing public dialogue was offered; our only regular contact was through Longo and, later, Storey.

This restriction against appointing an artistic director was received and passed around at one of our weekly Monday meetings at the Gazebo restaurant on Fountain Square. We interpreted this as meaning that any future grant would be withheld if we proceeded to search for an artistic director as outlined in the original proposal. The effect on the group was to inhibit including what seemed to be the primary source of energy and vision in the other festivals visited.

It was clear that major festivals, such as Spoleto, had evolved out of the imagination of a Menotti with bold visions in a receptive environment. I did not see how our festival could fully develop and mature without this kind of person, but we knew we were prohibited from going ahead in that direction. The effect was to move qualified artistic input into later stages of what was in fact a political as well as an aesthetic process in which the functions of artistic vision and local power were intertwined.

In 1999, the Riverbend festival remains without an artistic director, except at times for the blues programming guidance of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor Russell Lindeman. It was under the management since the late eighties of the same business person, Richard Brewer, who helped produce the Lyndhurst "amenities" project in the summer of 1981, "Five Nights in Chattanooga."  Brewer's resignation was announced in the spring of 1999, and a new manager was named soon after.  It now appears, even without taking into account private aspects of various individual actions in the beginning, that what seemed to be at the time an inviting bare stage had a director, script, partial cast and scenery, and was more in need of an audience than creative participation.

Yet an actual civic empty space beckoned; enthusiasm was building; many agreed the city needed some celebration of itself. Almost any sound was better than the felt silence, almost any activity better than the obvious empty streets. The small planning group accepted the constraints but continued the open process. The strength of this process and evidence of continued broad support for an artistic director is seen in the November 23, 1981 proposal's concluding paragraph:

An artistic advisor will be selected immediately upon approval of the grant request. The exact role of the artistic director will depend, in part, upon the individual selected, but the artistic advisor will be involved in all artistic decisions for the festival.

However, when the formal grant contract with a $60,000 check was awarded on December 2 for a "Chattanooga Festival," the foundation made doubly certain of its intentions regarding artistic direction:

[Description]: This grant is to be applied to the administrative costs of planning, organizing, and managing a Chattanooga Festival in 1982.

[Special Conditions]: This grant is conditioned upon the hiring of an experienced promoter whose track record in local concert promotions is approved by the Foundation.

The cover letter also stipulated:

Additionally, this grant is conditioned upon Friends of the Festival's employment as Project Director an individual whose experience, reputation and track record as a promoter of public events in Chattanooga is acceptable to the Foundation.

The sponsoring foundation was determined not to fund an artistic position, which it preferred to be left to another foundation. It would fund only administrative costs of $60,000.

The foundation was generous in its funding concept if not in its aesthetic insights into the creation of arts festivals. An earlier paragraph in the Dec. 2 contract cover letter noted:

In addition, the Foundation agrees at this time to contribute an additional $70,000 in 1982 for the above-mentioned purposes if Friends of the Festival is able to obtain "up-front" money in an amount not less than $300,000 in additional cash, credit, loan guarantees or as co-signatures on a note with which to book performers. In the event you are unable to attract support of this magnitude from the community prior to March 1, we ask that you refund to the Foundation all of the grant funds which have not yet been spent.

The refund request was not enforced. It was in this context of early deadlines and extreme pressure to find other funding sources that the festival's commercial side of its developing personality developed, which the lack of an artistic director also fostered. The same conditions led to the sale of admission pins and various sponsorships the following year. The implications of the Lyndhurst Foundation's funding policies are encoded in the Riverbend Festival (and throughout the community), and merit more extensive economic and public policy analysis than is possible here.

The aesthetic issue became critical after the full board was created. The festival's attorney, J. Nelson Irvine, advised the new president and executive committee in a memorandum on March 11, 1982, of the threat to the new organization's tax status if its artistic context was modified by excessively commercial objectives:

I note reference to the statement by Sid Hetzler that the main thrust of the festival should be artistic rather than commercial. I think it is important for the members of the executive committee to understand that the tax exempt status of the organization is an organization to promote the arts. Thus, the purpose of the organization's activities is artistic. The commercial involvement is only incidental insofar as the accomplishment of promoting the arts in the community is concerned. I think this is something that has been understood all along, and I don't think it needs further discussion but I wanted to remind the members of the committee of this and the context in which this organization is operating.

No record of a reply to this legal advice was found.

The absence of an artistic director left the festival without its force, driven only by its empty space and the power of its multifaceted idea--two legs of a three-legged stool, more than a little wobbly without the presence of an imaginative artist. This absence led in curious directions; because arts knowledge was an essential festival ingredient, many experts had to be consulted to help educate interested local supporters about the idea.

There is no substitute for professional competence in the arts as in any field; pop singer Roberta Flack was juxtaposed to sing with the Chattanooga Symphony in 1982 but, it was explained later, the festival's business staff did not know or forgot to schedule joint rehearsals. Singer and symphony performed in sequence rather than together. This tragi-comic miscue now seems a symbol of that year's preceding and continuing ideological struggle between the serious performing arts and the "good time" entertainment arts, a dichotomy that some argued then and now should never have been necessary if the effort had qualified artistic direction from the beginning.

Art Power and the Element of the Artistic Director

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. [Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1975) 39-40.]

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. [Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 40.]

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. He cites 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. [Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 47-48.]

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.

Plutarch recounts that Solon warned Thespis that his plays were lies that might find they way into the belief of the people: "If we honor and commend such play as this, we shall find it someday in our business." [A.M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1952) 3.]

From this perspective, it seems clear why business executives in Charleston and Chattanooga and even ancient Athens 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 sameness was predictable; the Charleston festival of 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 and unborn about to launch itself from their city. As was seen from recollections of a leading banker's reaction after visiting the Spoleto, Italy, festival, 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...and did until 1993, when Gian Carlo Menotti resigned over forced inclusion of public sculptures and other site-specific art works of which he disapproved.

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