Clearly the biggest news is a new production of Porgy and Bess — the opera is set in Charleston — at the newly renovated Galliard. A few details:

Porgy and Bess in Charleston—what could be more perfect? DuBose Heywardâ€s inspiration for Catfish Row is brought to life on the new Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall stage, just blocks from the historical Cabbage Row. David Herskovits, whose 1998 production of Mambaâ€s Daughters by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward won an OBIE award and sold out at Spoleto Festival USA in 1999, returns to the Festival to direct this landmark production. Visual Designer Jonathan Green takes us on a journey from the streets of the Charleston we know to a Charleston that reveals the roots, strength, and character of the Gullah community.

Yes, painter Jonathan Green (whose career got an early boost through the late Savannah curator Carroll Greene, btw) has done the visual design. I expect something stunning out of that collaboration.

The schedule also features Spoleto’s usual rich mix of music (jazz, classical, and more), dance, drama, and opera. I typically buy tickets for a couple of shows and make a full day of it for at least one Saturday during the festival, but I might try to see more this year.

I would normally be super excited about Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music, but that work was performed at the Savannah Music Festival in 2013. Also, interestingly there is no ballet on the program.

And, man, I was hoping that Laurie Anderson would come back to make up for last year’s cancellation, but no such luck.

But on the whole my first impression is that the 2016 season is a bit stronger than 2015. If anyone would like to trade comments about shows, please say something in the thread about this post on my Savannah Unplugged Facebook page.

Tickets don’t go on sale till January 14, but Spoleto does have a tiered early-purchase system for donors. I didn’t find that system an impediment to getting great seats (first row but not center) for a couple of shows last year, but I find the system off-putting. The previous year, I attended a performance at the Memminger Auditorium where ushers ended up sitting front row center in seats that had been blocked out when I made my purchase. That experience, plus a couple of others that I’ve written about over the years, have made me wary of trusting the festival’s seating charts, which shouldn’t be a typical fan reaction for a festival of such high, high quality.

Still, I’m sure I’ll be headed that way again, and I’ll be making restaurant reservation months in advance too.

This adaptation of Streetcar debuted in 2012, but I saw it for the first time a couple of days ago at Spoleto in Charleston. I’ve been thinking about the (virtually) wordless take on Tennessee Williams’ classic play ever since.

After the brief vignette with Blanche and the bare bulb, the balletic adaptation makes the first of several bold, potent choices. In the play, we learn about Blanche’s tragic marriage to Alan — the suicidal repressed homosexual — via dialogue relatively deep into the text, but the Scottish Ballet’s Streetcar moves the story up front, to great effect.

Granted, it might have been difficult for the ballet’s audience to follow the narrative if Williams’ original structure were retained, but embracing the chronology allows the full tragedy to unfold in a surprisingly fresh way. The reordering of scenes is just one of the successful and compelling choices by director Nancy Meckler, choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, designer Niki Turner, lighting designer Tim Mitchell, and composer Peter Salem. Kudos to all.

The celebration of Blanche’s elegant wedding is interrupted by the sexual tension between Alan and his soon-to-be lover. Blanche tries to get between the two men, but the tension, desire, and, eventually, shame create an insurmountably potent mix.

In an especially beautiful and evocative sequence, we see Blanche throw herself into wanton, escapist sex with a variety of men, and then we eventually see the literal crumbling of Belle Reve, which is preceded by a magnificently choreographed moment as family members die off.

Again, we see these scenes before Blanche’s fateful move to Elysian Fields — and we really see them. So instead of the reasons for Blanche’s desperation unfolding through spoken flashbacks, we see the roots right up front. The choice allows Blanche to be haunted periodically by Alan’s beautiful, blooded corpse and allows the play’s darkest themes and its homoeroticism to resonate in sudden, powerful ways.

If none of this sounds very subtle, well it isn’t — but it is. The ballet’s erotic sequences are restrained and artful; Alan’s suicide takes place off stage; the music has a fitting regional flair and captures the many moods of the story, but never becomes melodramatic.

We saw the Scottish Ballet’s Streetcar on the Saturday afternoon matinee at Charleston’s Sottile Theatre, and I found the performances and casting uniformly excellent, but I would have loved to see an evening show to see the alternate performers. The lineup that we saw will perform only one of the four shows at the Kennedy Center later this week.

As Blanche, Araminta Wraith has the expressiveness of both a skilled dancer and a silent film star. Fortunately, we were close enough to get the full effect of the anguish she projects just with her expressions and impossibly wide eyes. Wraith has a wonderfully lithe quality in the dream-like orgy at the hotel, but for much of the show she allows herself to project a tension and fragility that effectively ages Blanche.

Andrew Peasgood is youthful and absurdly handsome as Blanche’s husband Alan, and Rimbaud Patron (really, I want to meet the parents who would name their son Rimbaud) is intensely seductive as his lover. I just have three words to say about the Peasgood-Patron pairing: hot, hot, hot.

I’ve focused so far on the opening scenes of this adaptation of Streetcar; the real drama unfolds in sweaty New Orleans. Bethany Kingsley-Garner captures the naiveté of Blanche’s sister Stella; we empathize with her desire to please both her sister and her husband, and we want to shield her unborn child from the surrounding brutality. Christopher Harrison at first seems a little too fresh and youthful as Stanley Kowalski, but he soon won me over with his broad-shouldered, hyper-masculine swagger and smoldering stares — not to mention his athletic dancing.

There are few wrong notes. The bowling alley sequence perhaps feels a bit too West Side Story-ish, and I occasionally wanted something more soaring from the choreography, especially during the gorgeously staged ensemble numbers. And it’s worth noting that one word is uttered in the production: “Stella”. I imagine the creative team agonized over the handling of the iconic scene when Stanley collapses in the street to express his sorrow for assaulting his pregnant wife, but I think the scene would play better if he expressed all the emotion through his body.

But those seem like small flaws in such a rich, provocative adaptation.

By the time we got to intermission, the story seemed largely told. Could there really be a full second act? As it turns out, yes. The dance becomes more expressionistic — including an extended sequence where we see the full depth of Blanche’s dissolution, even before she is brutalized, degraded, and raped by Stanley. The reprise of the orgy scene, the proliferation of Mexican women selling flowers for the dead, Blanche’s emotional abandonment by Stella (who has no choice but to side with Stanley) and by her last-chance-suitor Mitch (played with excellent energy by Remi Andreoni), even the rape itself — all these scenes are thoughtfully and powerfully wrought.

Click on through for some images from the production (I would sure love to have gotten a chance to shoot this show):

A) solve a Rubik’s cube in a couple of minutes,
AND
B) do the last few moves behind their backs,
AND
C) accomplish those tasks while standing on their heads on a small pedestal in front of a couple hundred incredulous people,
AND
D) do all that after half an hour of ridiculous jumps, falls, throws, and flips, under the glare of a handful of tiny spotlights.

Daniel Liddiard falls into that narrow subset of human beings, and his amazing trick was just one of the highlights of A Simple Space, the thrilling American debut by the Australian acrobatics troupe Gravity & Other Myths at Spoleto USA in Charleston this week. (Performances continue through Tuesday, May 27 — highly recommended, if you can snag a ticket.)

The Emmett Robinson Theatre at the College of Charleston has been transformed into a theater-in-the-round for this show. The 8-member troupe — 5 male acrobats, 2 female acrobats, 1 excellent percussionist — performed in a space that’s even smaller and simpler than the name A Simple Space implies. The performance area is no more than a couple hundred square feet (smaller than the front parlor in many modest historic homes here in Savannah) with audience seating pulled up almost right to the edge.

There’s plenty of humor along the way — I especially loved the idea of raising my hand and saying “Falling” under the expectation that someone would catch me, but I resisted the temptation to try it in the lobby after the show.

The fast-paced performance included a wonderful game of “strip jumprope” as three of the male acrobats tried to outdo each other. When one particularly hunky performer was forced to strip to his boxer briefs, a woman behind me, who kept up a vaguely hysterical running commentary throughout, said, “I hope he loses again.”

Without a trace of irony, one of her companions replied, “Why do you say that?”

I would be irritated by so much talk in the audience at most shows, but not this one — the intimacy of the space and the winning personalities of the performers encouraged audience involvement, and we’d probably all just had a few drinks with dinner anyway.

I’ve seen some other physical theatre at Spoleto over the years — and it’s pretty much always excellent. But those shows have been on larger stages and have felt a little less spontaneous than A Simple Space.

It’s hard to beat solving a Rubik’s cube while doing a headstand and a game of strip jumprope (anyone?), but there were plenty of other fine moments, including various combinations that resulted in the female acrobats standing atop the shoulders — or even head — of a male acrobat standing on another’s shoulders, some spectacular throws and catches, a few wince-inducing contortions, a melee with even the audience throwing plastic balls at the performers, and a manic contest to see which of the acrobats with Gravity & Other Myths could do the most standing back flips.

And sweat. There was a lot of sweat, which the women behind me seemed especially fascinated by.

And did I mention that all of this took just under an hour?

Afterward, the troupe was scattered in the lobby to greet the audience — a personal touch that brought the evening to an emotionally satisfying end.

So for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, we bought floor seats in the front row. This review reflects that experience, which was pretty much wonderful. Still, I can’t imagine how frustrating the show would have been for folks sitting far from the stage.

The 35-year old company came to Spoleto with 18 skilled dancers, one more beautiful than the next, and a program that varied dramatically in emotional tenor and in influences. The effect was both thrilling and demanding.

Regrettably, the printed program did not list the dancers in each of the four pieces, so I won’t be able to give the individual performers the credit they deserve.

The show began with choreographer Nacho Duarte’s multi-layered Gnawa, The program notes Spanish and Mediterranean influences, but parts of the piece seemed more Eastern than Western to me — in good ways. A beautiful, flowing duet with a male and female dancer was at the core of the dance, framed by more complex passages with, at times, activity seemingly across the stage. The staging was especially striking — the shirtless male dancers in pants that looked like gold brocade (I covet a pair, although I sure wouldn’t look like those guys did), the female dancers in assymetrical black dresses, the subtle and dramatic changes to the white lighting.

An extended passage with candles on the front of the stage (could those even be seen from the back of the arena?) leant a sacral quality to the work.

After an intermission, five members of the company — three male, two female — performed William Forsythe’s Quintett, a particularly challenging and ambitious piece. The work had a disjointed quality — an intentional one — that was both hypnotic and, after a while, a little tedious. The repetition of Gavin Bryars’ music at times overwhelmed the delicate movements and sudden variations in movement and emotion, as dancers interacted intensely with each other before splitting into other combinations or leaving the stage entirely. There was a spotlight literally on the stage, across from a convex mirror; at one point, a filter in that spotlight showed a vision of the sky. But both the spotlight and the mirror seemed underused in the piece.

Regrettably, some audience members left the arena after that second number: they missed the final and strongest third of the program.

After the second intermission, three male dancers performed solo to old Dean Martin songs in Alejandro Cerrudo’s PACOPEPEPLUTO. A few thoughts:

• The lighting hit the dancer’s bodies in ways that highlighted their muscularity without feeling like an operating room.
• The men wore only dance belts (basically g-strings), so they were all but nude.
• I remember Dean Martin as the faux (?) drunk on game shows, but the guy could sing — and sounded really young in these recordings.
• The choreography grew increasingly fun and clever.
• Overall effect: The piece was immensely entertaining, really hot, and way too short.

That work segued right into Falling Angels, choreographed by JiÅí Kylián with percussive music by Steve Reich. The eight female dancers frequently moved in unison to the driving, somewhat repetitive beat. There was a fittingly robotic quality to certain passages — a quality that made the more fluid, complex parts of the piece even better.

The program as a whole was so varied that it was a little hard to find one’s footing — there certainly wasn’t any overriding theme to the selections. I’d be curious to see Hubbard Street on their home turf in Chicago, performing for audiences that already know the richness of the repertoire. The Spoleto program felt a little bit like a sampler platter — but one that you’d order again in a heartbeat.

All in all, beautiful work.

Spoleto 2014 runs from May 23rd to June 8th in a variety of venues — most of them excellent — in downtown Charleston.

Once again this year, there’s some overlap with the 17-day Savannah Music Festival. I’ve already bought tickets to see Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn at the SMF, so I won’t be going to that June 1st gig at the TD Arena at the College of Charleston (a problematically cavernous venue for an act like this). Jazz vocalist Rene Marie returns to Spoleto in 2014 (also, bizarrely, at the arena); she performed in 2013 at the SMF.

Regrettably, the TD Arena is also being used for a couple of promising dance performances. I thought the arena was a really terrible venue for Compagnie Käfig in 2013, so I’ll have to think hard about going to either of those shows.

But there’s one show that I know I’ll be attending: Laurie Anderson at the Sottile Theatre.

I’ve seen Anderson twice at Spoleto, and both were memorable shows. Anderson’s late husband Lou Reed even sat in with Anderson in one performance of Homeland back in 2008. I was lucky to be there.

The show by Lucinda Williams looks mighty tempting too. Charleston’s own Shovels and Rope is also in the lineup.

Here’s the embedded digital program:

If the embed isn’t working, you can check out the schedule here or here.

I highly recommend at least heading up to Charleston for one day — for a couple of shows and a great meal or two. If you want to try some place popular like Husk, be advised to make reservations very early.

Tickets go on sale to the general public on Dec. 9th.

Billed as “physical theater”, Le Grand C features 17 acrobats engaging in one mesmerizing stunt after another, all strung together with understated choreography, subtle lighting, and simple costumes that keep the focus on the sheer skill, strength, and beauty of the performers.

Le Grand C‘s relatively slow, measured pace is established early on, as one acrobat after another interacts with a round, heavy piece of wood about three feet in length. With the wings of the Memminger entirely exposed, the performers walked onto the dimly lit stage, performed a subtle and in some cases pretty easy stunt, and then surrendered the silent space to another. When not active on stage, the performers typically just stood in the dark on one side or the other.

There was no music at all for that extended opening sequence, which set the tone for the rest of the piece. Sometimes the performers would simply walk through the space, defining the edges of the large mat on which they worked, deftly avoiding each other even as they made occasional eye contact.

Several dozen times in the 80-minute show, the acrobats scaled each other so that one would be standing on another’s shoulders. Typically, a third person would be up there too, sometimes standing on the head of the second — or doing a handstand — or being thrown into the air, doing a couple of flips, and landing on the shoulders of the top member of another two-person tower.

My mind kept trying to find some sort of metaphorical meaning in this layered interdependence and in the sudden, risky flights, but I’m glad to report I found no meaning beyond the purely human and physical majesty.

A few times, there were towers that extended four performers high, including an inexplicably moving moment near the end of the show when the man on the bottom kept singing some sort of French folk song for as long as he could as his fellow performers climbed atop him. He gasped, shuddered, and quit singing as the fourth one clambered just past his shoulders.

For the most part, a few of the larger men formed the bases of these human towers, with the women on top, but there were delightful and unexpected variations that made even the repetitious movements feel fresh. In one great moment, an older, somewhat slighter acrobat (Abdeliazide Senhadji) supported a tower with three others rising from his shoulders.

Most of these stunts unfolded slowly — perhaps out of concern for simple safety — but the pace was all the more effective because of the juxtaposition with more kinetic moments, like the launching of performers high into the air so that they could land in a hammock of arms well across the stage. In one beautiful moment, two female acrobats even embraced in mid-air before being caught together by a group of their companions.

Toward the end, the towers began to assemble themselves with the acrobats lying down and then being lifted up one person at a time by the rest of the troupe.

And then everyone would walk around a bit — with only the occasional flirtatious look, snicker, or physical provocation. They’d gather themselves, and then do something else I’ve never seen human bodies do.

I could have watched Le Grand C all day and deep into the night.

There are shows of Le Grand C on 5/27, 5/29, 5/30, 5/31, and 6/1. They appear to be mostly sold out, though there are some seats remaining front right and front left. Trust me, those are excellent seats, especially if you can get in the front row, despite how iffy they might appear on the seating chart.

In my largely negative review of Compagnie Käfig at the TD Arena, I noted the very misleading seating chart and other basic production issues.

Well, as much as I enjoyed Le Grand C, I have to note some odd problems with that production as well.

I’m pretty well acquainted with the Memminger Auditorium — a spectacular and versatile black box venue. I’ve had some amazing experiences with front row seats there for Spoleto shows, including Laurie Anderson’s Homeland in 2008, Gallim Dance’s I Can See Myself in Your Pupil in 2010, and Kneehigh Theatre’s The Red Shoes in 2011.

I missed the date when tickets went on sale for this year’s festival, but I figured even buying a week late I might have a shot at front row tickets for Le Grand C. But the clickable seating chart for the Memminger wasn’t working when I tried to select specific seats, and the automatic selection of the two best seats was putting me in a row about halfway back. Now, those would have been perfectly fine, but I just like sitting close.

So I called the ticket office and was told that no front row seats were available — but second row center was up for grabs. Lovely.

They were great seats, for sure, but there were about 10 empty front row seats for Saturday’s show. Three people from somewhere else were seated by a festival employee or volunteer in empty seats in the front row of the left orchestra. But that left multiple other empties, including two right in front of us, which were taken after the show began by two (quite tall) ushers.

But that still left about eight empty seats in the front row at what appeared to be a sold out show. There was one handicapped guest in the front row, so maybe other seats were held for that purpose. Or maybe that row was simply blocked out for special guests or festival supporters. Curiously, the seating chart for the remaining shows this coming week simply shows no seats in front row spots where I know there are in fact seats.

Why?

I’m really not sure, but if you end up with ushers sitting front row center — in my opinion, the best seats in the Memminger — there is a flaw somewhere in the system.

And that wasn’t the only weird issue.

Fortunately, the two toddlers just in front and to the right of us were amazingly well-behaved, but there was one really chatty kid behind us and off to the left. Since the show had extended passages without music, we could hear that toddler talking off and on for the entire show.

At what point do the ushers, festival employees, or venue managers — or somebody — go up to an audience member and simply say that they can’t stay if their child can’t be quiet? In this case, the noise didn’t just interfere with other guests’ ability to enjoy the performance, but could potentially have raised concerns about the safety of the acrobats.

So, my experience was a bit of a puzzle this year. Did I just have bad luck in my negative experiences regarding Spoleto’s normally stellar production values? Or has the festival adopted some flawed systems for ticket sales and venue management?

But the College of Charleston’s TD Arena is a deeply flawed venue. The problematic staging and the awkward pacing of the dances resulted in a show that I found several notches below the expectations I have for Spoleto productions.

First, let me rant about the arena. The seating chart on the festival website gives a simply terrible impression of the actual layout. Thinking that it would be good to be slightly elevated rather to sit in the middle of the floor, I purchased seats in row A of the Concourse level. But the floor seats, about half of which were empty, extended much further than the chart illustrates, and the seats to the left and right didn’t even come close to the front of the stage as shown. As a result, even in what should have been very good seats, we could barely see the dancers’ expressions. Stunningly, the most expensive seats for the performance were 10 rows behind us — if I had paid $20 more to be that far from the stage, I’d likely be complaining for a refund.

The combination of the venue itself and the sheer physical demands of hip hop dance led to another regrettable problem: some patrons thought that the audience should applaud every time a dancer pulled off a difficult move. But Compagnie Käfig is a dance troupe; we were not watching Disney on Ice. Even one of the ushers started clapping loudly and somewhat maniacally to the beat of one Latin folk tune.

Good for Compagnie Käfig to have risen to such prominence that it can command venues of that scale, but I can’t recommend that anyone see them in an arena unless you get tickets as close to the stage as possible. Hip hop is all about sudden tension and sinewy muscularity; if you can’t get close enough to feel that energy, you probably ought to just stay home. The only really great seats for this Spoleto production were probably those in the front row center on the floor.

Of the two dances, Agwa was by far the more ambitious, with clear plastic cups and water used as props, with the shirtless dancers trying to combine, conserve, and finally drink. But an extended segment with the dancers in clear rain ponchos seemed a little too cute, and the dance as a whole was practically overwhelmed by the sheer physical perfection of one dancer’s head-spinning.

The music, too, varied in ways that contributed to an uneven pace. Rather than feeling like a symphony with distinct movements, each dance felt more like a collage of styles. The whole was certainly not as good as the sum of the parts.

After the company took their bow at the program’s end, they came back on stage to keep dancing in a kind of freestyle, semi-improvised street dancing. And I guess that closing exemplified the problem that Compagnie Käfig faces from an artistic standpoint: do we turn these incredibly talented dancers loose or try to contain their skills within tightly defined choreography?

I wish I could say that at least the sound was good in the arena, but it wasn’t. We were seated not all that far off center, but I was pretty much only hearing music from one bank of speakers.

Here’s a screenshot of the deceiving TD arena seating chart that comes up when you try to buy tickets online. There’s a more detailed and somewhat more accurate graphic elsewhere on the Spoleto site, but there are errors there too and the floor seating takes up a good deal more area than pictured there — which means the concourse seating is even farther away. The festival has other shows scheduled for the space, which will likely have the same issues.

I’ll have another post up soon with a much more favorable review of the Spoleto production of Le Grand C.

I already reviewed our great dinner at Husk.

And I already reviewed the fabulous show Traces by Les 7 Doigts de la Main.

We also had a really good lunch at the Patat Spot Friet & Falafel, which obviously specializes in falafels (but I tried the vegetarian frank).

And we also saw A Crack in Everything by the dance company zoe|juniper, which was something of a disappointment. The choreography did an extraordinary job of heightening tension, but did nothing to resolve that tension. At several moments, including when two dancers stripped entirely, I thought some sense of the performers’ and the piece’s humanity would come to the fore — but the opposite always happened. Sometimes surprises are nice, but not so much this time.

Before and after the shows, Adrienne and I wandered around. We snagged a microbrew draft at Pearlz Oyster Bar for a break, but for the most part we were on foot whenever we weren’t at the theatre.

We didn’t go to the point of the island at all, but we did explore some interesting streets that I’d never seen in addition to some very familiar ones.

You can click for larger versions and in some cases hover over the image for a caption.