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The Burial at Thebes, Amistad and Donna Uchizono Company

At various venues in Charleston, S.C., on June 1 and 2

There is always at least one production at Spoleto Festival USA that is so powerful it remains embedded in my brain forever. Such a one is the Nottingham Playhouse's The Burial at Thebes.

In an inspired decision, Nottingham's artistic director, Giles Craft, nabbed the rights to Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Sophocles's Antigone, which was commissioned by Dublin's Abbey Theatre to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2004.

The Irish poet/playwright, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995, has produced an absolute miracle of dramatic language with The Burial at Thebes. He moves incisively between different metres for different characters, as well as balancing direct language against flights of poetry. From the very beginning, his script is relentless in its descent to tragedy.

Heaney's choice of title, The Burial at Thebes, focuses attention on the play's major conflict. Antigone gives her brother a proper funeral even though her uncle, King Creon, has expressly forbidden religious observance for a traitor. With dizzying speed, arguments flow back and forth about the rightness and wrongness of Antigone's action.

Director Lucy Pittman-Wallace has reconfigured the production for the outdoor walled garden of the College of Charleston. The stage sits in front of the mighty Greek classical columns that grace an 18th-century campus building, evoking a Greek amphitheatre.

Jessica Curtis's costumes are brilliant. The entire cast wears a grey toga-like robe when part of the chorus. When they have to play a specific character, the robe is taken off them to reveal their costume beneath. While that scene is performed, the robe is draped over another player, who then dresses the actor when the scene is done. This seamless character change is one of the glories of the play because it means all the characters are onstage for most of the time.

Pitman-Wallace has the chorus sing and dance during their recitations following the practice of ancient Greece. Mick Sands, also a member of the Greek chorus, composed the chilling songs, and several of the actors also play musical instruments that are placed discreetly on the stage. The mesmerizing ritual movement comes from Jackie Matthews. The acting is an embarrassment of riches with an unbelievably strong cast led by Paul Bentall as Creon and Catherine Hamilton as Antigone.

The big event at this year's Spoleto Festival is the opera Amistad, which inaugurates the $6-million (U.S.) renovation of the Memminger Auditorium that had been left a ruin by hurricane Hugo in 1989. Amistad was first performed in Chicago in 1997. For this remount, Spoleto commissioned a leaner and more intimate version.

Both composer Anthony Davis and his cousin and librettist, Thulani Davis, are African Americans, so how is it possible that their take on this important event in American history has been denuded of any drama?

In 1839, Africans captured in Sierra Leone and bound for slavery in Cuba took control of their Spanish ship after a mutiny led by Cinque (bass-baritone Gregg Baker). The navigator (tenor Raul Melo) deceived the blacks about taking them back to Africa by setting a northward heading. The ship was ultimately captured by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Abolitionists hired former president John Quincy Adams (bass-baritone Stephen Morscheck) to argue the case before the Supreme Court. The judges ruled that the Africans were not slaves and ordered the American government to return them to their homeland. The case was a galvanizing event in the slavery debate that led to the Civil War.

The Davises do not tell this gripping story. Rather, they introduce two African gods, the Trickster (tenor Michael Forest) and the Goddess of the Waters (soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams). The Mende tribe believed that if they actually saw the gods, evil would follow them. A bare-bones plot does follow, but not a very compelling one.

The first act deals with events at sea and the capture, and the second act revolves around the trial, if obliquely. Mythology merges with reality, doing service to neither.

The Trickster is on the ship with the Africans and orchestrates their mutiny. As for the goddess, she gets to sing one very confused, symbolic aria about dead Africans being thrown into the sea during the crossing. The Davises also manage to reduce Adams to a non-entity.

There are positives. Emmanuel Villaume conducts the score with verve. Despite the mostly arioso – up and down vocal lines – Davis has included spectacular instrumental effects, such as driving rhythms and atmospheric tone poems. He has also written rousing ensembles, choruses and some quite lovely arias such as the homeland lament sung by the African woman Margru (soprano Janinah Burnett). The cast boast strong singing performances.

Director Sam Helfrich's vision of a theatre in the round elaborately rendered by designer Caleb Wertenbaker works, but the mix of modern and period costumes by Kay Voyce does not. What Helfrich cannot do is find dramatic moments where a listless libretto has none.

Donna Uchizono has been making dances in New York for 20 years. She is certainly an original. The Donna Uchizono Company presented State of Heads (1999) and Low (2002), and both are challenging pieces. The first is stark white in environment and costumes, while the second is black. Both have original, evocative music by James Lo and Guy Yarden, respectively, and both feature a trio of dancers, one male and two females in the first, and the reverse in the second.

State of Heads is about lack of communication. For this very slow piece Uchizono created a staccato, robotic gestural language. People attempted to speak but others didn't listen. Low was a complete contrast with its elements of tango, and heavy tortuous movement on the floor. In this case, the aloof woman seemed to be causing both competition and despair in the men.

Uchizono is a meticulous choreographer who creates physical images that trigger many meanings for the audience. Her work is sophisticated and difficult yet intriguing, and much of the Charleston audience was quite bewildered by her dances.

Spoleto Festival USA continues in Charleston, S.C., until June 8.