On a warm Charleston afternoon in front of City Hall, General Director & CEO Mena Mark Hanna officially opened the 2026 season of Spoleto Festival USA with remarks that reflected on the role of art, civic life, and collective imagination at a defining moment in American history.
As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, Hanna’s speech positioned the Festival not only as a celebration of artistic excellence, but as an essential act of community-building — one rooted in Charleston’s layered history and animated by hundreds of artists, staff, volunteers, and audiences coming together over the next 17 days.
Below are his full remarks from Opening Ceremony.
“This is my fifth festival as General Director and CEO at the helm of this extraordinary institution, and every season begins exactly here — all of us gathered in front of City Hall, on a warm afternoon, full of anticipation. It reminds me, every time, that we do not begin Spoleto alone. We begin it together.
This year, we begin together in a particular moment, because America turns 250. So, let me say plainly what we, at Spoleto and in Charleston, believe. We believe that the arts are not ornamental to civic life; they are constitutive of it. The arts are integral to a strong, safe democratic society. They are how a community discovers what it believes, how it grieves, how it argues with itself, and how it imagines forward.
There is a moment in history I keep returning to. It’s the winter of 1778 in Valley Forge. The Continental Army is starving, the desertions are mounting, the Revolution is close to collapse — and George Washington stages a play. He understood something it has taken us 250 years to articulate: that a people cannot hold together on logistics alone. People need a shared imagination. Without it, there is no republic. Washington understood this; he understood, at a time when it was forbidden by the continental government to produce theater, that freedom of expression is not what free societies produce. It is what makes free societies possible.
And Charleston is not neutral ground. Its beauty is real — but so is its weight, and that history lives close to the surface. Our arts organizations could choose to step outside of all that. But we don’t. Spoleto steps inside, and it asks the harder thing: not what we have been, but what else might we become. That is the work I believe Spoleto exists to compel — the ability to bring people together from different walks of life in counterpoint, in harmony, with each other.
And it takes an extraordinary number of people to compel it. Over the next 17 days, Spoleto’s full-time staff of 30 becomes nearly 600. Add the volunteers, and there are some seven hundred people in this city, right now, giving themselves to this single act of civic imagination. So let me thank them. To the city and the state, our civic partners who make the ground beneath us possible. To our board, our donors, and corporate partners who believe this is worth sustaining. To the festival-goers—the ticket buyers—including those here for the very first time. And above all, to the festival-makers: our artists, our technicians, our staff, and our volunteers, who make this Festival run, on and off the stage.
Over the next 17 days, the work on our stages will reach back centuries and arrive startlingly new — some of it having never existed anywhere before this Festival gave it a life. All of it proceeds from a single faith: that imagination, set free, is the single most revolutionary force in human history.
Welcome to Spoleto.”