 | Spoleto Festival USA is an annual 17-day festival of the arts which produces opera, and presents dance, theater, classical music, and jazz. The Festival is held in Charleston, South Carolina in late May and early June. It claims an audience of between 70,000 and 80,000 each year. |
| Charleston was chosen as the location for the festival due to its wealth of theaters and other performance spaces. Each year, the festival hosts over 100 performances by international artists in a variety of disciplines. Since its inception, it has presented 100 international premieres and 93 American premieres, notably Creve Coeur by Tennessee Williams and The American Clock by Arthur Miller. The first theater built specifically for public performances in the American colonies, the Dock Street Theatre, was built in Charleston in 1734. (The original theater burned down two years later and was eventually rebuilt.) Over the next two hundred and fifty years, many other theaters said to rival the best in Europe were built in Charleston. The 32nd season of Spoleto Festival USA will be held from May 23 to June 8, 2008. The program includes a 17-performance of the Chinese opera, “Journey to the West”, at the Sottile Theatre, College of Charleston. The photo (taken by Rolf Müller on April 17, 2005) shows a painting depicting a scene from the “Journey to the West”. Four heroes of the story are shown: (left to right) Sun Wukong, Xuanzang, Zhu Wuneng, and Sha Wujing. The painting is a decoration on the Long Corridor at the Summer Palace in Beijing, China. Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記) is one of the great classical novels of Chinese literature. The tale is often known simply as Monkey. The novel is a fictionalized account of the legends around the Buddhist monk Xuánzàng's pilgrimage to India during the Táng dynasty in order to obtain Buddhist religious texts called sutras. Part of the novel's enduring popularity comes from the fact that it works on multiple levels: it is a first-rate adventure story, a dispenser of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment. Event: Spoleto Festival USA Date: May 23 (Friday) - June 8 (Sunday), 2008 Location: Charleston, South Carolina USA | |
| SOURCE: Spoleto Festival USA |
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