Every 250 years or so, a world power might benefit from a thorough moral inventory, the kind that artists are hard-wired to provide.
Are we living up to our chosen name, the United States of America? When those declarative signatures inked our independence, did we truly abandon notions of an aristocracy? Do we remain a paragon of innovation and derring-do, set to take risks to realize ideas?
As Spoleto Festival USA 2026 played on these past few days, the emphasis of the international festival looked inward at the American proposition, though not at the exclusion of standout works from afar.
Curated to draw from the country’s vast and varied cultural coffers and highlighting its signature embrace of the freedom of expression, recent festival days offered far-ranging fodder for thought, just ahead of commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago.
Whether paying tribute to iconic homegrown composers like George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, mining regional sounds from Appalachian bluegrass to Gullah spirituals, or breathing new context into the revolution that started it all, America was in the house.
The first days of the festival had set the stage.
An ingenious, layered first shot across the bow, this year’s poster featured “Three Flags,” the 1958 work by Jasper Johns, the South Carolina artist gone global. Then, in The Fiddle and the Drum, soprano Renée Fleming and American banjo player Béla Fleck focused their outsize talents on Appalachian traditions, following its soaring sounds through love and loss and war. Martha Graham Dance Company: Graham at 100 danced through a staggering span of American history via the singular, seminal vision of the boundary-breaking choreographer.
The second week of the festival continued the exploration.
You know you’re on home turf when the program spotlights Ken Burns, the country’s acclaimed chronicler of American history. On May 27, in an absorbing evening of conversation with political commentator John Avlon, Burns paced the sold-out crowd through clips from his docuseries The American Revolution, which were interspersed with works performed by musicians and members of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra evoking the era. All illuminated Burns’s approach eschewing the “fife and drum treacle” of our creation story.
A staged reading of George + George, a world-premiere work by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, dramatized a lesser-known sliver of revolutionary history: In 1777 at Valley Forge, George Washington elected to put on a play to buoy spirits among his men. Since the country’s founding days, the impulse to process and uplift with art has been baked into the nation, from the Declaration to the battleground.
From distant shores, that notion was further explored by a stunner of a show, Scottish Ballet’s narrative work, Mary, Queen of Scots, which opened on May 28. Choreography by Sophie Laplane drove the always excellent, at times jarring, dancers, who were accompanied to perfection by Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra. The company’s uncanny ability to reanimate history with visceral contemporary flair is astounding in its own right. At the festival, the earlier, bloodthirsty doings of the British crown via Elizabeth I also lent further insight to the crown that American revolutionaries were keen to quit.
At St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church on May 31, Spoleto Festival USA Music Director Timothy Myers led members of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra in Appalachian Spring and American Music, a program of three works. In the 2014 Banner, contemporary composer Jessie Montgomery reconsiders “The Star-Spangled Banner” to reflect a multicultural country.
Soprano Rachel Blaustein then transported the audience with her lofty, lyric delivery of Knoxville, Summer of 1915, the work by English composer Samuel Barber created from a James Agee poem. Finally, Myers led the orchestra back to the terrain explored by Fleck and Fleming, by way of a rousing rendition of Aaron Copland’s folk-infused Appalachian Spring.
Then on June 1 at Charleston Gaillard Center, Spoleto patrons peered behind the figurative curtain of the storied, complex journey of America’s first opera, Porgy and Bess. In the buzzing Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall, The Untold Story of Porgy and Bess gathered community members, with some in attendance returning to the very stage that in 1970 made local history and national news.
The program centered on footage from the documentary-in-progress of filmmaker Lauren Waring Douglas, When Porgy Came Home, which recounts the origins of the DuBose Heyward novel, the opera Porgy and Bess by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin.
The evening included footage from the film that fans of the opera and of Charleston past will relish. Musical selections from the opera performed by the S.C. State Concert Choir and prominent Charleston musicians. Host Carolyn Murray led a conversation with Douglas and artist Jonathan Green, who created the set and costumes for Spoleto’s 2016 production of the opera, reflecting on its Gullah roots and their African origins. The evening culminated in a stirring sit down with members of the original cast, among them the effervescent Annette McKenzie Anderson.
In aggregate, a ticket holder in 2026 would be hard-pressed not to marvel at the arc of American culture on stage during Spoleto, and be moved to ensure that such freedom of artistic expression marches on.
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