From the General Director

Mena Mark Hanna

“We sailed in the big Sea for a month and a half until we came to a place called Charleston.”

These words, written in Maghrebi Arabic, are the words of an African who survived the Middle Passage through the Atlantic. They are the words of a man sold into bondage here in Charleston. They are the words of a scholar who spent a quarter century in west Africa studying Islam, mathematics, and astronomy before his enslavement. They are the words of Omar Ibn Said.

This year, Spoleto Festival USA premieres Omar, an opera by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels based on Omar Ibn Said’s autobiography. Omar’s account is the only existing example of an autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in North America, and his words carry meaning far beyond the Carolinas. When Omar was asked to write “his Life” by his owners in 1831, it was meant to capture a “curiosity”: the curiosity that an enslaved man could write, the curiosity of a strange language, the curiosity of a heathen religion. Through the blanks on these scant pages, the gaps in his account, and the veiling of personal faith in Christian imagery, Omar preserved himself: linguistically, spiritually, and psychologically.

Two hundred years later, that curiosity is stripped away, and the words of this enslaved man are brought to life through the emancipatory power of music, less than a mile away from Gadsden’s Wharf, where he and 100,000 other enslaved Africans were forcibly landed in the United States.

That is momentous.

Omar was commissioned by my predecessor, Nigel Redden, to be premiered for the 2020 Festival. Over the past two convulsive years, calls for justice rang throughout our communities; the opera was twice delayed by the pandemic and is now reimagined by director Kaneza Schaal. Omar in 2022 is different than Omar in 2020. That is true of all performing arts. Though it is hard to see through the dim cloud of an ongoing pandemic and a continual struggle for equality, we are living in a cultural renaissance. Artists are demonstrating how the past bleeds into our present while imagining a better future. Artists are embracing the multiplicity of human expression. Artists are reframing the canon through their perspective. Artists are unwavering in the belief that their practice—now more than ever—can bridge differences.

The 2022 Festival is at the forefront of this renaissance. Omar is an opera by African American artists, told, in Michael Abels’s words, from a “Black perspective, telling the story of Black people in the United States.” In Unholy Wars, Karim Sulayman recasts the medieval crusades from the vantage of an Arab American through Italian baroque opera. Choreographer Reggie Wilson and his Fist and Heel Performance Group delve into the obscure history of 19th-century Black Shaker communities in POWER. The Festival Orchestra presents a premiere restoration of Rhapsodic Overture by Edmund Thornton Jenkins, a Charleston-born Black composer who died in Paris at age 32 in 1926, virtually unknown in his homeland.

We express the indomitability of the human spirit in Lift Every Voice and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; witness tragic love told backwards in La bohème; and dance with every primeval fiber of our being to Youssou NDOUR, The War and Treaty, and Shakey Graves. Like Dael Orlandersmith in Until the Flood, art has the ca-

pacity to tell one story, eight different ways. Charleston embraces this counterpoint by threading Africa, Europe, and North America into a tapestry that is both of the United States and for the greater world.

It is this quality—ineffable and enigmatic—that drew Gian Carlo Menotti (with the help of Mayor Joseph Riley and Ted Stern) to found an international festival here. Of course, as Menotti rightly points out, Charleston is beautiful: he wrote of “the magic of its streets, the noble charm of its buildings” in the Festival’s first program book. But beneath beauty, lies an everyday reality. This is a city of contradictions: an outpost of the northern Caribbean, a Southern city of antebellum charm, and a sometimes painful melting pot of the past and present. Charleston is all these things.

When I think of this Festival—and what it means to this city—I think of it as an engine of progress; a place where we can share our humanity, for better or worse; and a multidisciplinary celebration of skill, perseverance, and joy. In opening the first Festival in 1977, Mayor Riley wrote:

For in the arts we find our most important values: the truth, the beauty, and the commitment to excellence we see in the conductor’s style, in the dancer’s grace, in the artist’s colors, in the musician’s and composer’s creation, and in all of the achievements of the performers of such a comprehensive arts festival. The arts, then, in this way, can serve as an example and inspiration to a community or an entire society in its search for values—in its search for justice, equality, humanity, and excellence. Therein lies Charleston’s greatest pride: that our graceful, historic, and lovely City can serve as the home of such an important cultural event.

To that I say: welcome, Omar.