Shangri-La for Artists

The town curls like a dozing cat on the side of a sunny Umbrian hill. Tourists rarely wander down its narrow, cobblestoned streets. But last week little (pop. 16,000) Spoleto was wide awake, jolted out of its centuries-long slumber by an explosion of song and dance.

To Composer Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds had come some of the freshest talent of the U.S. and Europe: Choreographers Jerome Robbins and John Butler, Conductor Thomas Schippers, Painters Ben Shahn and Saul Steinberg, Stage Director Luchino Visconti. The biggest eye opener of the festival so far was an irreverent band of youngsters in sweatshirts and sneakers imported by Choreographer Robbins to give Italians a bracing sample of modern ballet.

Cool Depths. Choreographer Robbins brought four ballets to Spoleto: Todd Bolender's Games, plus his own New York Export--Opus Jazz, Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert. In this quartet, Jazz--which Robbins regards as "my most important ballet in a long time"--was the only wholly new work. Set to a jazz-flavored score by Manhattan-born Composer Robert Prince, it offered a back-alley view of the "postures, attitudes and rhythms" of the teen-agers who run and "rumble" on U.S. city streets.

As performed last week, it opened with a stark roll of drums followed by a saxophone drag that sent a line of twelve kids snaking around the stage and into a shoulder-shrugging, foot-dragging pantomime of exaggerated futility known as "The Slop." Deadpanned, stony-eyed, the dancers stalked the stage in chilling isolation, occasionally made wary, shoulder-grazing efforts to come together, then drifted off again into the kind of cool depths no adult can plumb. The audience sat solemn-faced, but greeted the final curtain with a roar of applause.

Impresario Menotti could also count some other audience successes: a curtain-raising production of Verdi's early, daringly experimental Macbeth, given a sharply profiled, showily romantic reading by Conductor Schippers; a tensely moving performance of Eugene O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten; four "chamber ballets" by Choreographer John Butler. Still to come: Wisconsin-born Composer Lee Hoiby's opera The Witch, Florentine Composer Valentino Bucchi's Il Giuoco del Barone, the Daudet-Bizet L'Arlesienne.

Excavated Shops. To set the scene for his four-week festival, Menotti refurbished the town with such gusto that the astounded inhabitants started calling him Il Matto (The Madman). He tore out neon street lighting and substituted antique carriage lanterns, got Cathedral Square temporarily deconsecrated so intermission-coffee tables could be placed outside the adjacent theater. At the same time, a group of townsmen dug out a row of medieval shops, now stocked with modern paintings and Italian bric-a-brac. Facelifting and the scheduled productions have cost roughly $250,000, and even with private and foundation support, Menotti is not sure yet whether he will break even.

In a villa above the town, he is working on a new opera scheduled for production at Brussels which he hopes will give him the cash to "pay my personal bills." But his real concern is that the festival will succeed enough to be repeated. If that happens, Spoleto will become what he intended it to be: a kind of artistic Shangri-La, where young U.S. and European artists can retire every year to talk shop and "express themselves freely, unhampered by political creeds or esthetic fashions."

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