If there is one thing that Mena Mark Hanna wants to impress upon you right now, it’s that the arts are no bauble.
“The arts are not something that are ornamental to society. This is not filigree,” the general director and CEO of Spoleto Festival USA told Charleston City Paper. “The arts are deeply constitutive to a strong civic democracy and I think that artistic expression has been a part and parcel of who we have been for millennia.”
So when the festival splashes its signature, multi-disciplinary spectacle across Charleston’s spiffiest venues for 17 days, patrons will know that the beauty is just the beginning.
It just so happens such free thinking matches with this summer’s consuming national event: the 250th commemoration of the American Revolution, which is already capturing prime media real estate, not to mention the country’s collective mental space.
Man with a global cellular plan
If you’re out and about in Charleston, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the crisply-suited, 41-year-old Hanna hustling his smart shoes down some sidewalk, iPhone affixed to ear like a permanent appendage, charged conversation at full tilt. If he spies a familiar face, he’ll wave a bright hello, all while neither breaking his stride nor train of thought.
The person on the receiving side of that call may very well be located in most any part of the world. Perhaps it’s an acclaimed Scottish choreographer, an Australian aerial artist or a Norwegian theatermaker.
There may even be an occasion for Hanna to break out his enviable facility with the German language, the glottal stops of which were finessed during his years as founding dean and professor of musicology and composition at Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin–or another of the several languages the New Jersey native has picked up along the way. Certainly, he’ll access his mastery of music, as keen to wax euphoric about Wu-Tang Clan as he is about 19th-century composer Robert Schumann.
Peak performance
While we have yet to see how Hanna’s curatorial vision plays out this year, one thing is clear. This year’s festival is tracking to pack them in.
“We’re looking at a ticket sales velocity that is matching pre-pandemic times,” he said.
Hanna’s also shaping up to be an operatic rainmaker, with the festival’s two operas either sold out or trending to sell out, an almost unheard happenstance in the field.
“The Dido and Aeneas-Circa opera is not being done anywhere else in the country. It’s spectacular, absolutely, and I mean spectacular in the true meaning of the word spectacle” he said of the work’s production and presenting, namechecking Circa, the contemporary Australian circus group that is part of the work.
The sold-out production of The Old Maid and the Thief, an opera by composer and Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti, is emblematic of the approach Hanna has honed in his years since joining the festival in 2021.
“It’s a lark. It’s a comedic piece. I think it does what it does successfully in terms of telling people a story in a way that is lighthearted and fun and not too long and not too over the top, but over the top in the right ways.”
That includes the addition of Patti O’Furniture, a popular and Best of Charleston-winning drag queen, who will serve as host.
“I would also categorize it as an appropriately camp production. I think if you kind of lean into camp in opera, you’re doing well. Opera sort of deteriorates as an art form for me when it tries to be ultra realistic,” Hanna offered.
Hanna said he had a programmatic epiphany after mounting The Turn of the Screw last year, learning that the opera needs to be matched successfully to the venue in a very intentional fashion.
“When you market an opera, talk about it as if it’s not an opera, as if it’s anything other than opera. I mean, it pains me to say it, but The Turn of the Screw is a success because it’s a creepy ghost story and a creepy venue.”
That calibrated matching informs other programming, too. So, yes, acts like Brandi Carlile and Indigo Girls are on the line-up as part of the Cistern Yard series, but they are not replicating shows they might perform at outlets like Coachella or South by Southwest.
Hanna’s strategy is to bring exposure into opera borrowing from other art forms, something made more possible with the cross-pollination of a multi-disciplinary festival, creating a sort of “wedge product” that other entities can’t.“I do think to a certain degree we’re the envy of a lot of our peers in the sector, and it’s primarily because we can overlap,’ he said.
Festival unfettered
Soon, Hanna’s cell phone confabs nailing down endless details will converge unfettered in peninsular Charleston. And unfettered is the operative word.
Taking its cue from the 250th commemoration of the American Revolution, the festival was curated to highlight the freedom of expression that is a foundational hallmark of the nation.
Some festival shows, such as the theatrical production George + George by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, delve directly into America’s nascent notions of freedom. An Evening with Ken Burns is an immersion in the American Revolution.
“I love how much George + George and that story is incisive and instructive of this idea, but that freedom of expression was incipient into what this country is.”
Others celebrate American artistic expression. In music, Jason Moran pays homage to composer, pianist and big band leader Duke Ellington; Terence Blanchard and the E-Collective toast John Coltrane and Miles Davis at 100; and Renee Fleming and Bela Fleck delve into Appalachian sounds.
In dance, Martha Graham Dance Company’s centennial production celebrates one of America’s seminal 20th-century choreographers and tap phenom Ayodele Casel reinvigorating a singularly American art form. The subject goes particularly local with The Untold Story of Porgy & Bess, a one-night-only event featuring excerpts from the documentary When Porgy Came Home that mines the homegrown opera’s complex journey.
Still, Spoleto Festival USA is first and foremost an international performing arts festival, and the 2026 lineup widens the aperture of freedom beyond these shores.
Among those works are Scottish Ballet’s Mary, Queen of Scots; a deep dive into devilish Shakespearean characters via actor Patrick Page; Dead as a Dodo, the children’s show from Norway; and the opera Dido and Aeneas, which hails from Australia’s Opera Queensland.
“That’s also very much freedom of artistic expression, which I see as a basic fundamental human right across the world, not just exclusive to America,” Hanna said.
The festival launches May 22 and runs through June 7. For tickets and information, visit spoletousa.org.
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