Learn How Amazing Live Performances Come to Charleston via the Spoleto Festival

Perhaps the most common question you’ll overhear at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, is, “What are you seeing tonight?” It's an event where one evening, you can watch the world premiere of an opera and another night see a legendary performer play some of their greatest hits. Over the course of 17 days, the city brims with incredible talent as told through dance, theater, opera, and musical performances. Each season features local and regional performers as well as global phenoms, all of which are enjoyed by the local community and out-of-towners who come to revel in the magic of Charleston.

Spoleto is in its 49th year and, in 2026, it’s hosting roughly 120 events in historical venues throughout the city. From May 22 to June 7, attendees can see the iconic Indigo Girls perform one night and enjoy Grammy-winning percussionist Pedrito Martinez on another. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns will blend conversation, music, and imagery to explore the American Revolution, and actor Patrick Page plans on diving into the villains of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s an unbeatable array of performances that showcases human creativity and expression in its many forms. Tickets are now on sale for the 2026 season of the Spoleto Festival.

My Modern Met had the opportunity to speak to Mena Mark Hanna, the general director and CEO of Spoleto. Scroll down to read our exclusive interview, which covers the fascinating history of the festival and why the city of Charleston is the perfect place to host it.

Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina

Spoleto Festival USA 2016: Opening Ceremonies

How did the Spoleto Festival begin?

In 1977, there was an Italian-American composer named Giancarlo Manatti. He had founded a festival in Spoleto, Italy, called La Festivale dei Duemondi, “the festival of the two worlds.” He wanted to create a counterpart festival in the United States; that was always the dream to have one festival in Italy and the counterpart in the United States.

He went up and down the Eastern seaboard, went all throughout the contiguous United States, and landed in Charleston. I think something about Charleston itself lends it a remarkable quality as a place of creativity and artistry. I don’t know if he had the full view there. I think Charleston has become much more interesting as a place that captures the best and worst that this country has to offer in its history.

But he was attracted to its walkability, the fact that it is a port city, the fact that it has all these remarkable venues, and the fact that it wears its history so much on its sleeve. Fast forward to 2026, 49 years later, and you’re at a point where Charleston is not only all of these things, it’s been through a renaissance, really at its incipient point, but Spoleto was the renaissance. It started to grow and turn into a local creative and cultural economic capital because of Spoleto in ’77.

Photo: © William Struhs

Why is Charleston the best place for Spoleto?

We have a really spectacular and incisive view of the history here. [Charleston has] an outward beauty that belies a terrifying past as the main port of entry for the Middle Passage for the transatlantic slave trade. And it’s the city that started the Civil War.

On top of all that, it’s a place that I think wears this kind of unity of different cultures in one place spectacularly well, maybe not as obviously as New Orleans does. But, [Charleston] is a meeting point of North America, Europe, and Africa, the three continents that have made up the modern United States. You see that with the Gullah Geechee roots here. Black people who live in the Low Country and have lived here and have been brought here through the slave trade, particularly through enslavement of West Africans, because they had an expertise in rice farming, and that became a huge cash crop in South Carolina.

But also the fact that this is a place that had a spectacular Huguenot population. It had a spectacular, and still does have, one of the oldest Jewish populations in the southern United States. So it’s got all of this history. The history is this remarkable swirling tempest that is everything that is the United States. It creates this remarkable kind of fecund groundwork for creativity and artistry.

I don’t think Menotti kind of had that entire view; he just sort of landed in the place because of its outward beauty, its venues, et cetera, the port city. I think he kind of maybe intrinsically understood its deeply historical import. But between all of that, you have this remarkable 17-day festival. It’s the country’s premier performing arts festival. You don’t have a festival in the United States where you can see Brandi Carlile or Renee Fleming and then see a world premiere play under one roof.

Porgy and Bess, Spoleto Festival USA 2016 (Photo: Julia Lynn Photography)

Can you share more about Spoleto’s programming in general?

Spoleto is roughly 110 to 120 events in a 17-day period. So, five and a half concerts a day, more or less. We have like 50,000 ticket holders over those 17 days. (It’s not as big as Jazz Fest, which has 200,000 ticket holders.) But it’s very expansive in the kind of art that we bring in.

There are definitely local darlings that we have at the festival, like Quentin Baxter, who’s a multi-Grammy award-winning jazz drummer. He is a fixture at the festival. And then we have performers who often come back because they feel a kind of kinship with Spoleto, Charleston, and Southern culture. So you'd see that with some New Orleans performers, like Trombone Shorty, who really loves to come here. You can see that with the Punch Brothers, Kirstila—folks who like to come back a lot.

But you really do think of Spoleto as a place of new daring work that hasn’t been seen before. In addition to the fact that we are a multidisciplinary festival that is doing all of these different things, one of the main things that we do is that we premiere and produce new work that’s never been seen before. I think probably most exemplified by our 2022 world premiere of an opera by Rhiannon Giddens, the banjo superstar, and Michael Ables, the composer of those remarkable soundtracks for Jordan Peele films. He composed the soundtrack to Get Out and Nope, et cetera. They co-composed an opera called Omar, which was based on an enslaved West African who was sold into bondage in Charleston, in Gadsden’s Wharf, just down the street from where it was premiered in 1807. That piece went on to win the Pulitzer Prize the following year, in 2023, for the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Next year, which is our 50th anniversary, we’ve got a huge list of new works that we are commissioning and premiering, which are very exciting. I would categorize some of them as worldwide artistic events.

Spoleto Festival USA 2016: 40th Season Celebration Concert

Can you give us a preview of what attendees can expect in 2026?

This year, we’re doing a world premiere play by Dennis O’Hare, the Tony winner. He won the Tony for the remarkable baseball play, Take Me Out. He’s a really great actor as well. He’s been in everything from True Blood through to American Horror Story through to Milk and The Proposal. He’s one of those people who’s in all of these different films.

[O’Hare’s] new play, George and George, is a hilarious romp on something that actually happened. In 1778, George Washington was in Valley Forge freezing his butt off. His troops were in the doldrums; everything was kind of going wrong. And he decides in this moment—this is the true story—to put on a play. He put on Cato by Joseph Addison. And I just love the idea that [despite] battle plans and supply chains and the precipice of the revolution, he’s just like, live auditions, let’s start a call. That’s kind of the vibe of this comedy.

Dennis O’Hare and his co-writer and director, Lisa Peterson, came up with George and George because it was also the favorite play of George III. And George Washington also put that play on at a point in time where drama and theater were actually forbidden by the colonial government. He understood it’s something we’re all trying to understand 250 years on, which is the inception of the birth of this country, of the idea of freedom of expression. And that’s something that I find very inspiring as well.

We have a U.S. premiere production by Scottish Ballet based on The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I saw in Edinburgh last year, and which is an enthralling production. We also have a U.S. premiere production of a new production by Circa and Opera Queensland in Australia of a 1698 opera by Henry Purcell called Dido and Aeneas. It’s based on Virgil’s Aeneid, and it’s being done with trapeze artists and tightrope walkers. Spoleto is a festival that revels in the spectacle.