Mission Statement
Spoleto Festival USA's mission is to create a comprehensive and innovative arts festival in Charleston, South Carolina. The Festival produces and presents events featuring an international mix of distinguished artists and emerging talent. The Festival seeks excellence in all its endeavors as it strives to provide excitement, enjoyment, and education for artists and audiences alike.

Description:
Goals
Spoleto Festival USA's goals are to: offer programs of the highest artistic caliber to a diverse and expanding regional, national, and worldwide audience; support experimental and innovative work; nurture exceptional young artists; present a variety of both new and traditional works; engage and instruct young people; encourage public understanding and appreciation of the arts; and to improve the cultural/economic life of the community.

Service to the Local, Regional, and Performing Arts Communities
As the Southeast's leading cultural resource, Spoleto presents artists and performances of an extraordinary caliber not typically available in the region, thus ensuring annual exposure opportunities to audiences restricted by geography while also enriching national audiences with international, multidisciplinary programming.

Spoleto's ongoing community-based public art program "Evoking History" has explored the culture's diverse region through partnerships with local organizations including the Avery Research Center for African-American History & Culture, Drayton Hall/Historic Trust, the City Housing Authority, Clemson University School of Architecture, and the Borough Cultural Museum & Gallery. Spoleto's arts education initiative, educationSPOLETO, works with the Charleston County School District, local youth organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club, and the Palmetto Project to expose underserved children to the arts. Piccolo Spoleto, the outreach arm of the Festival organized by the city of Charleston, programs 400-500 free and low-cost events during the 17-day Festival season, offering access to all segments of the community and affording local and regional artists a national audience.

Broadly speaking, Spoleto has served as a prominent model for the ways in which cities can successfully use the arts to spur urban revitalization. Festival staff is regularly asked to consult on the feasibility of starting other festivals, and Spoleto Festival USA has served as a model for other multidisciplinary festivals, including the New Haven International Festival of Arts & Ideas, the Virginia Waterfront Festival, and the Lincoln Center Festival.

History:
History
Spoleto Festival USA transforms the historic city of Charleston, SC, into a vital center for the arts each spring through the production and presentation of a wide spectrum of the performing and visual arts. By juxtaposing the traditional and classical with the new and innovative, the Festival creates intriguing combinations that reinforce one another while enticing diverse audiences to experience a wide variety of work. Each year, the Festival produces and presents more than 120 events featuring artists from around the world performing opera; theater; ballet, contemporary, and postmodern dance; music theater; jazz, chamber, contemporary, and symphonic music; and visual arts. While each year's Festival has no specific theme, the programming philosophy is based on the premise that a wide array of styles, types and traditions, when experienced in close proximity, will reinforce one another in ways not previously imagined.

Spoleto Festival USA was founded in 1977 by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gian Carlo Menotti and conductor Christopher Keene, along with their associates at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. Since 1958, the Italian festival, held in an impoverished region of Italy, has been a window to the world of opera, dance, music, theatre, and visual arts for audiences in Italy which, at the time, were exposed to relatively few international developments in these art forms. Desiring to replicate the Italian festival in the United States, its founders chose Charleston, South Carolina as the ideal location. As its founders had hoped, Spoleto Festival USA has similarly served as a showcase for both classical and innovative performances and exhibitions for audience members predominantly from the Southeast, but also from throughout the United States and the world. Much like its Italian counterpart, Spoleto Festival USA has made significant contributions to the revitalization of its host city, helping to inspire a cultural and economic renaissance that has transformed Charleston into a vibrant tourist destination as well as an exceptional place to live.

Spoleto produces and presents multidisciplinary work from across the spectrum. Programming is developed by artistic directors Emmanuel Villaume (Opera & Orchestra), Joseph Flummerfelt (Choral), Charles Wadsworth (Chamber Music), and general director Nigel Redden and producer Nunally Kersh. Management style has played a catalytic role in the organization's recent growth/ fortification. In the mid-90s the Festival experienced a difficult period; a collapse in management coupled with significant debt threatened its future. Fortunately, the artistic leadership remained stable. New management immediately began an extensive long-range planning process to restore the Festival's financial health. The Festival leveraged the retirement of its debt into the ownership of a building and the creation of an endowment. Most gratifyingly, the Festival has grown artistically--shifting from presenting rented opera productions to producing all of its own, as well as increasing the number of commissions and staging a number of unusual, artistically challenging events.

Contact people:

David Graham, Volunteer Coordinator (Administrative Offices), (phone), (email) Susie Prueter, Assistant Production Manager, (phone), (email)

Office fax number: (843) 723-6383

Address:

P.O. Box 157 Charleston, SC 29402

Web Site: http://www.spoletousa.org