Festival to celebrate Tarantella’s past

By Michael Rosen-Molina
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The Tarantella is famous as the frenetic dance that victims of
the dreaded tarantula used to perform to clean their systems of the
deadly poison.

As strange an idea as that might sound today, even stranger is
that the dance actually seemed to work. Although the effectiveness
of the practice might puzzle modern medicine, the explanation is
really quite simple: there never really was any spider.

Throughout the month of October, the Italian Oral History
Institute is organizing a series of conferences, lectures, seminars
and workshops on Tarantismo and related ecstatic phenomena.
“Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance and Ritual in the
Mediterranean,” explores the dominance of such rapturous
states of the tarantella.

“It would often happen around the Mediterranean in the
summer that young women working out in the fields would suddenly
think that they were bitten by a spider,” said Luisa Del
Giudice, an organizer of the event.

“They would display depression and anxiety; their parents
would notice something wrong and call in musicians to see if the
change was the result of a spider bite,” Del Giudice said.
“They would play rhythms to awaken the spider and make the
girl dance in an ecstatic trance. The dancer would imitate the
movements of the spider, crawling, running and finally
collapsing.”

Even after the woman recovered from the bite through such
ritual, the ordeal was far from over. Every year, around the end of
June, the girl had to travel to the shrine of St. Paul, the patron
saint of the the Tarantella, at Galantina to pay homage to the
saint and re-create the same excited dance.

“There weren’t any psychiatrists back then to help
them,” joked Del Giudice. “The dance allowed women to
work some frustration out of their system.”

Some featured events include a lecture/demonstration of Sufi
tradition, the faith of the famed whirling dervishes, by UCLA
professor Ali Jihad Racy, as well as an exhibition of “The
Lomax Collection: Photographic Essay,” which will be
available at the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

“Ellen Lomax made one of the first field expeditions to
record European songs and musical traditions,” said Del
Giudice. “These photos were taken during that
campaign.”

The Lomax exhibit concerns itself with the Italian region of
Salento, where the Tarantismo tradition lasted longer than in other
areas. Pictures of Tarantismo pilgrimage sites taken between 1970
and 1992 will also be on display.

Musicantica, a musical group dedicated to exposing the sounds of
traditional Mediterranean music to a wider audience, will also
recreate the traditional Tarantismo process in a show at the Freud
Theater, Oct. 2 at 2 p.m. In the prologue to the performance, a
narrator explains how he has been inspired by the stories of
Tarantismo to write a poem on the subject.

“In the first stage, the victim lies on the floor on a
white sheet, surrounded by icons of St. Paul,” said Roberto
Catalano member of Musicantica. “Colored tissues are used to
represent the color of the spider.”

“The victim is allowed to scream, shout insults and
generally behave in a way that she would not normally be allowed to
behave,” he continued.

Superstition underlying this performance claims that the venom
of the spider’s bite must be sweated out of the system and
the best way to do that is for the victim to dance.

“The phenomenon has even been reported in modern times, as
recently as the 1960s,” said Catalano. “Poverty,
underdevelopment and the high demands of work were all contributing
factors to the start of the Tarantismo.”

“Women were oppressed; they had no income and everything
they earned became the property of their husbands,” she
continued. “Even with all the help that the Italian family
provided, it was a great load on a woman’s back.”

Different spiders, however, often had widely different tastes in
music and it was the job of the musicians to find out which genre
the victim’s tormentor preferred.

“A spider frequently became known by a pet name, like
Katharine, for example,” said Del Giudice. “Depending
on the personality and name of the spider, it could prefer anything
from erotic to melancholy music.”

Musicantica is a Los Angeles-based group that performs a variety
of Southern Italian music from the 17th century to present. The
group performs both oral and popular songs, as well as instrumental
constructions by composers of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Catalano performs on frame drum, guitar and mandolin, while
other members include Enzo Fina on guitar, frame drum and
percussion; Lorenzo Buhne on guitar and drums; and Kebron Parker on
accordion, guitar and friction drum.

“Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the
Mediterranean” takes a look at all varieties of music
associated with the Tarantismo, in addition to other ecstatic
traditions.

“The ecstatic trance is a very old tradition; some believe
it even goes back as far as the Dionysian orgies in ancient
Greece,” Del Giudice said.

“We had the idea to place the custom in the context of the
Mediterranean, to show that certain traditions are widely shared
around the world,” she said.

ART: “Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in
the Mediterranean” continues throughout February. For more
information, contact Luisa Del Giudice at the Italian Oral History
Institute at (310) 474-1698.