Dance impresario Daniele Cipriani to direct the Spoleto Festival
The Italian Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, has nominated Daniele Cipriani as Artistic Director of the Spoleto Festival. The well-known dance impresario will take over from Monique Veaute after this year’s festival ends. It is being suggested that there may also be separate directors for the music and drama sections of the programming.
In a letter to the President of the Festival and Mayor of Spoleto, Andrea Sisti, Giuli called Cipriani a “young talent in the field of dance and music”. Currently, state funding covers 70% of the festival’s budget, but the minister hinted at increasing the subsidy, saying “we are taking steps to ensure that this happens as early as this year when the new statute is operational”.
The Spoleto Festival is also known as the Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds). It was founded by composer Gian Carlo Menotti in 1958, who wanted to show the American and European cultures side by side. Its twin is the Spoleto Festival USA, held in Charleston, South Carolina, though the two festivals now run independently. In 1986, Menotti also established a Spoleto Festival in Melbourne, Australia, now known as the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts.
The first performance at the festival was Verdi’s Macbeth, directed by Luchino Visconti, with scenes and costumes by Piero Tosi, and conducted by the festival’s first music director, Thomas Schippers. In May 1979, Schippers’ ashes were interred in the piazza in front of Spoleto’s cathedral where he conducted several concerts. Tosi and Visconti would collaborate again in 1963 with La traviata and in 1973 with Manon Lescaut.
Carla Fracci danced there many times, including pas de deux with Paolo Bortoluzzi from Coppelia and La Sylphide for Jerome Robbins‘ Celebration, “a tribute to the art of Pas de Deux”, and in 1975 in John Butler’s Medea with Mikhail Baryshnikov.
In 1964, The Royal Ballet gave the world premiere of Rudolf Nureyev’s production of Raymonda. Thirty-six hours before the opening Margot Fonteyn’s husband was shot and she rushed to be by his side. Nureyev prepared Doreen Wells to dance the role in just a few hours.
The festival has seen concerts by Luciano Pavarotti and Renée Fleming; dancing by Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova, Joaquin Cortés and Roberto Bolle; performances by conductors Riccardo Muti and Antonio Pappano; dance premieres by Robbins and Pina Bausch; directors Ken Russell and Roman Polanski; writers Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Eduardo De Filippo and Ezra Pound; actors Al Pacino, Vittorio Gassman, Gérard Depardieu, Marisa Berenson and Marion Cotillard… it’s a long list.
However, the fame of the festival has diminished a little in recent years but with an increased budget and ‘under new management’, the culture minister wants to restore the Spoleto Festival to its former glory.
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Italian ballerina Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
