Good fortune continues to smile on the Charleston area, particularly at this time of the year when the city bustles with all manner of artists and creatives.
Yes, it’s our season of two festivals, Spoleto Festival USA and the city’s companion Piccolo Spoleto Festival. As the 17-day celebration of all things arts draws to a close, it’s important to reach out and give a pat on the back to the thousands of visitors and residents who
filled tens of thousands of seats and to the artists whose sweat and toil again energized the Holy City with world-class performances.
By all accounts, this year’s festival season continued to thrill. At mid-week with several days left before the June 8 closing, Spoleto Festival USA reported it issued more than 45,000 tickets in an arts celebration that was end-loaded with high-quality shows and concerts, including the world premiere of Manual Cinema’s The 4th Witch, the U.S. premiere of Gravity and Other Myths’s Ten Thousand Hours, delightful cabaret with Isaac Mizrahi and thrilling performances at the College of Charleston’s Cistern.
Similarly at Piccolo Spoleto, there’s a big buzz in the air for everyone involved, from emerging artists to seasoned veterans who display their art and engage daily with visitors and residents.
At the Charleston City Paper, we’re blessed to partner with the Goldring Arts, Style and Culture Journalism program at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. For the last four years, graduate school journalists joined the City Paper staff for three weeks to offer dozens of stories about the festivals, allowing the newspaper to provide the best comprehensive arts coverage in the region for readers.
By the time the festivals end this year, we will have published more than 50 insightful stories and profiles online and in print by students and City Paper staff — all about arts in the Holy City. Imagine any other community that offers this powerful journalistic resource to readers.
Eric Grode, who is finishing a 10-year run managing the Goldring program, said students get real-world experience in Charleston at the newspaper as they complete their master’s degrees.
“They shed their Syracuse snow boots and walk the peninsula armed with sunscreen, a notebook and endless curiosity,” he said. “They interview cellists and acrobats, griots and ballerinas, tenors and tap dancers. And then they embark on their post-college lives, stuffed with too much ice cream and the memories that will position them to better make sense of the beauty and the complexity that awaits them.”
So hat’s off to Charlestonians, visitors — and student journalists — for making this year’s Spoleto festival season one of the best in a while.
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