Mattia Mantellato | Università Kore di Enna (original) (raw)
Videos by Mattia Mantellato
A multimodal and dance-theatre adaptation of one of the most celebrated poems written by the Cari... more A multimodal and dance-theatre adaptation of one of the most celebrated poems written by the Caribbean writer, playwright and artist Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize for literature in 1992). Mattia Mantellato's interdisciplinary project aims at connecting dance and literature, giving voice through gestures and movements to incorporeal and highly imaginative visual verses. The Schooner Flight recounts the adventures of the sailor Shabine, it examines the representation of a Caribbean identity, the confrontation with the colonial past and domination, the power of the creative imagination and the potential for a collective redeem and liberation. The choreography works on a double track because it translates Walcott's ideas and context, and simultaneously interplays with the spaces, borders and edging territories in which the interpreters of the work are living and experiencing: the cross-cultural Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia.
The video-abstract presents my PhD project titled "Caribbean decolonisations: Derek Walcott's nar... more The video-abstract presents my PhD project titled "Caribbean decolonisations: Derek Walcott's narrative rewritings and artistic encounters"
6 views
This project is the result of a partnership collaboration between the University of Malta (Prof. ... more This project is the result of a partnership collaboration between the University of Malta (Prof. Antoinette Camilleri-Grima) and the University of Udine (Dr. Mattia Mantellato), in cooperation with Heritage Malta and the Partnership Studies Group based at the University of Udine, a visualising and thought-provoking experience that “bridges the divide” between apparently different cultures, identities and scenarios at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea.
It is a bilingual, multimodal and transdisciplinary project that merges together dance, music and literature. The goal is to break up epistemic and canonical boundaries between languages, disciplines and the arts, in order to embrace an intricate and unpredictable multimodal dialogue, which reflects the complexity of today's wor(l)d societies.
1 views
Books by Mattia Mantellato
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
This book focuses on Derek Walcott's literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique... more This book focuses on Derek Walcott's literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique has depicted the Nobel Prize laureate as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century world. This, however, devalues his fundamental contribution to the realm of Caribbean theatre and art. The text examines Walcott's multimodal production, a combination of West Indian folkloric forms and Western-oriented structures and themes, by discussing three of his works - two plays, The Joker of Seville and Pantomime, and a long poem, Tiepolo's Hound. These epitomise respectively a response to Spanish, English, and French cultural legacies in the New World as postcolonial re-writings of Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, and Camille Pissarro's stories. Following Quijano and Mignolo's decolonial approaches and Riane Eisler's partnership perspective, the book uncovers the strategies used by Walcott to respond to the colonial matrix of power.
Book Chapters by Mattia Mantellato
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
Drawing from decolonial thinking and non-binary studies, and from Riane Eisler’s biocultural part... more Drawing from decolonial thinking and non-binary studies, and from Riane Eisler’s biocultural partnership-dominator approach, this paper focuses on the power of the unpredictable encounters and the dialogic wor(l)d in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Whilst most postcolonial literary critique stresses the violent divisions at the core of the different stories in the novel, my analysis demonstrates how narrative, linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries are suspended in an unmarked territory in which the cycles of nature re-establish the sacred meaning of life, human consciousness and its relationship with all creations. Coetzee wittingly portrays the inconsistency of colonial frontiers in the Magistrate’s self-destabilising quest and his uncertain understanding of the “barbarian” systems of signs, embodied in the alien Otherness of the girl. In this sense, my analysis reads the novel as a partnership quest that reveals profound spiritual truths and dissolves the constraints of Western dominator outposts and their borders.
Forum, 2020
To celebrate the short experience of the Federal government of the West Indies in April 1958, the... more To celebrate the short experience of the Federal government of the West Indies in April 1958, the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was commissioned to work on a play that would capture the shared values and cultural unity of his multifaceted and heterogenous community. This “massive undertaking” led to the production of Drums and Colours, an epic pageant covering four hundred and fifty years of Caribbean history through the depiction of four emblematic characters linked to the Antillean archipelago: Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Toussaint L’Ouverture and George William Gordon. Walcott wanted to decolonise the narratives of Western literary “canon” in re-writing these characters according to a new perspective. At the same time, he presented original unknown heroes and “dispossessed voices” and their unpredictable encounters shaping the “open” hybridity and schizophrenic reality of the Caribbean. I will study how Walcott reverses the carnivalesque West Indian performance in a destabilising “theatre within theatre”. I will show how paintings, dances and songs articulate the colourful rhythms of tribal drums in a creative form that unbridles conventional artistic practices, thus enriching our ecosophical perception of reality.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
The book challenges the myth of the neutrality and detachment of the scholar. Its strength lies i... more The book challenges the myth of the neutrality and detachment of the scholar. Its strength lies in its dynamic, engaging and passionate participation in the meeting of texts and words of different genres, geographical areas and cultures, in the pluralistic diversity of the themes explored, in its fundamental and creative relations with ecosophy, ethnophilology, ecofeminism, system theory and ecolinguistics. It brings together renowned international scholars to focus on postcolonial, ecocritical, mythical, and archetypal studies of literature, education and its partnership mediation, applied linguistics and plurilingual education.
Editors: Antonella Riem Natale & Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.
Contributors: Valentina Boschian Bailo; Elisa Bertoldi; Nicholas Birns; Maria Bortoluzzi; Mark Cladis; Gillian G. Tan; Coral Ann Howells; Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; Paul Kane; Mattia Mantellato; Lyn Mccredden; Antonella Riem Natale; Deborah Saidero; Janet Todd.
A Note from the Editors: The book expands the field of ecocritical, ecosustainable and partnership studies. It provides a wide range of analysis, creative writings and research on the relationship between human and more-than-human encounters; it promotes new eco-sustainable approaches to education; it analyses today’s complex wor(l)d from a gender-balanced, caring and peaceful lens. It brings together the work and research of known scholars worldwide but also emerging young researchers.
Refereed Journal Articles by Mattia Mantellato
Le Simplegadi, 21, 23: 51-69, 2023
This essay focuses on Alexander Ekman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an ambitious dance-theatre pro... more This essay focuses on Alexander Ekman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an ambitious dance-theatre project that the renowned Swedish dancer and choreographer produced for the Royal Swedish Opera of Stockholm in 2015. Ekman’s performance “reverses” Shakespeare’s comedy by bringing on
stage the traditional Swedish midsummer festival with its ring dances around the maypole, while mixing ballet with chants, popular rites and
new technological devices. In my twofold analysis, I focus first on Ekman’s
innovative choreographic “texture” which, despite the choreographer’s assertion that it is completely detached from Shakespeare’s story, is in reality
a close reproduction or “play” between reality (Act I) and dream (Act II).
Second, I show how drawing from Shakespearian themes, Ekman destabilises world dominator and patriarchal views in order to embrace imaginative partnership visions of reality (Eisler 1988), which have much to say about our most intimate and concealed truths.
Le Simplegadi, 2022
This article reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from an “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Ga... more This article reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from an “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Garrard 2004) and “blue” (Hau’ofa 2008; Ingersoll 2016; Mathieson 2021) or ‘water’ perspective. It focuses on Eliot’s magical and aesthetic (r)evolutions depicting the sterility and degradation of life after World War I. I focus on three episodes that mix modern expressions and arts with highly evocative and spiritual forces coming from Eliot’s American heritage and his interest in Eastern religions and philosophies. Madame Sosostris’s reading of the ‘wicked’ cards becomes in this way a Modernist dance of ‘liquid’ archetypes. Tiresias, the prophet and true ‘seer’ evokes a Cubist painting while substantiating the need for fluid and more positive encounters in our life. The three-time beating refrain in the Shanti prayer epitomises the rhythm of water-dropping, the expected coming of water that will heal and re-connect humanity with the ‘One life’. In this “undisciplined” (Benozzo 2010) interpretation, I read The Waste Land as a prayer for water, a communal and “partnership” (Eisler 1988; Eisler & Fry 2019) claim for regeneration and transformation, in the acknowledgement that we, humans, are just one side of the spiralling and cosmic music of the world.
US-China Education Review B, 2022
The demographics of the Mediterranean islands like Malta have changed drastically in the last 10 ... more The demographics of the Mediterranean islands like Malta have changed drastically in the last 10 years mainly due to migration flows from the south and east. During the scholastic year 2018-2019, Maltese schools had a 12% non-Maltese population overall, but in some coastal areas, this meant an 80% shift to a cohort of non-Maltese students. Teachers have been abruptly faced with the need to adopt multicultural and inclusive pedagogical approaches for which they did not feel they were fully equipped. This article describes the creation of a multimodal video production aimed at filling in this gap. It is based on the Partnership Studies philosophy, proposed and expounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler, and on the Blue Option, a cooperative and proactive approach that looks at the "sea" as a space for encounter, understanding, and new intercultural awareness. The video has been tested with two groups of teachers in training, in order to investigate whether, and in what ways, it inspires student-teachers to express empathy with the migrants. Positive results have been extrapolated from the written reflections of the participants.
Quaderni di Semantica, 2022
This paper analyses Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (Ihimaera [1987]), one of the most renowned M... more This paper analyses Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (Ihimaera [1987]), one of the most renowned Māori novels, from a twofold perspective: first, through an ecologically-oriented "blue option" (Hau’ofa [2008], Ingersoll [2016], Mathieson [2021]), an exciting and provocative slant that emerged in the humanities as a framework to investigate sea literatures and cultures of the ocean, and second, through a "partnership thought" (Eisler [1988]; [1995]; [2002], Eisler - Fry [2019]), a transformational approach propounded by the social theorist and activist Riane Eisler on the urgent need to re-think relationships between individuals, communities and the environment (Riem - Thieme [2020], Riem - Hughes-d’Aeth [2022]). The Whale Rider is a powerful decolonial (Quijano [2007], Mignolo [2012]) story that recounts the adventures of Kahu, the female descendent of a strict patriarchal Māori community, who will have to re-establish not only the sacred role of women within her society but also revive the tribe’s ancestral bond with the more-than-human world (Hubbel - Ryan [2021]). In tune with the Māori spiralling perception of life, the analysis uncovers Ihimaera’s narrative strategies in depicting an ever shifting "tidalectic" (Brathwaite [1992]) reality in which gender boundaries, mythical genealogies and natural manifestations are re-drawn in light of a more interrelated and peaceful oceanic future. The Whale Rider presents an insightful re-writing of Western-European and Northern Atlantic postcolonial views through an alter-native and "blue" text that depicts an-Other and more ecologically sustainable partnership world.
Quaderni di Semantica, 2022
In the last decade, unprecedented migration flows from the southern shores of the Mediterranean S... more In the last decade, unprecedented migration flows from the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea northwards resulted in a significant change in the ethnic and cultural composition of school populations in several European countries, not least in Malta. Teachers were faced with a wave of cultural and linguistic diversity for which they felt unprepared. Considering that displacement flows are expected to continue in the future, negative perspectives on migration need to be revised. The project Bridging the Divide: Partnership and Migration was an attempt to explore whether an aesthetic experience can stimulate empathy, as part of teachers’ professional development. In line with the partnership approach, promoted by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler, this article details the creation of a multimodal video production, bringing together dance, music and poetry in a visualising experience that speaks about migration in the Mediterranean Sea. The project was later implemented by two focus group sessions who discussed and produced written meditations. From the participants’ answers we identified reflections that showed how a multimodal experience can work successfully in stimulating empathy with the migrant, so as to promote partnership education in teachers’ professional development.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2022
Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the... more Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the biocultural partnership-dominator model propounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler (1987; Eisler, Fry 2019), this essay explores The Moor’s Pavane (1949), one of the most successful dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello by the Mexican-American emigree, dancer and choreographer José Limon (1908-1972). In this paper I will draw a parallel between the Bard’s text and Limon’s dance composition to show how textual and embodied forms can merge and become a perfect medium for the displaying of all nuances in human ‘nature’, desires, and relations. In the world of ballet, the performance was revolutionary because it presented for the first time Limon’s original technique, a complex re-working of Humphrey and Weidman’s practices and a mixture of different dance-styles and tempos. The Pavane, a rigidly fixed court dance performed in Northern Italy around the Renaissance period, becomes the means through which Limon portrays the changing of order and stability of Shakespeare’s plot, so as to debunk the hypocrisy of Elizabethan society and embody Othello’s falling into Iago’s trap. In my analysis, I will explore how Limon transposed and decolonised the Shakespearean tragedy through highly innovative fall-recovery movements, iconic gestures, and precise geometrical patterns. I will focus in particular on Limon’s choice to reduce the intricate plot to a four-hand partnership dance between two different and yet parallel couples, Othello-Desdemona and Emilia-Iago. The aim of my analysis is to show how Limon slowly breaks up the Pavane’s immutable tempo in order to provide a rhythmical crescendo of movements that express the tensions, disillusionment and final choices of the main protagonists.
MRER, 2021
This article discusses the implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference's (CEFR) ... more This article discusses the implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference's (CEFR) set of descriptors relating to 'personal response to creative texts' in the teaching of Maltese as a Foreign Language (MFL). The new volume of the CEFR's Companion Volume, published in 2018, included a number of new descriptors, among which are those related to learners' response to creative texts. As an initial application of this new set of descriptors to MFL, we created an intermedial video production involving poetry, music and dance, that brings to the fore issues of migration. The video stimulates a reflection on humanity's collective history, and suggests the idea that we all are descendants of people who came from the sea. In addition to the highly motivational aspect of the task, it has helped us estimate the difficulty of such a task in the context of MFL. We also obtained some insight into the application of the relevant descriptors for this part of the MFL syllabus.
Parole Rubate, 2020
Nel maggio del 2007 l’allora direttore del balletto del Teatro Nazionale di Praga, Petr Zuska, al... more Nel maggio del 2007 l’allora direttore del balletto del Teatro Nazionale di Praga, Petr Zuska, allestisce per le scene della Repubblica Ceca un’opera dal titolo Solo pro tri, danza o assolo per tre. È questo l’inizio di un successo che, oltre a consacrare la carriera coreografica di Zuska, fonde in un unicum artistico le storie di vita e i testi di tre cantautori d’eccezione del panorama culturale slavo ed europeo degli anni ’60 e ’70 del secolo scorso: il belga Jacques Brel, il russo Vladimír Vysockij e il ceco Karel Kryl. La scelta non è casuale, ma riverbera la volontà di esplicitare, attraverso il linguaggio della danza, gli istinti e gli animi di quella particolare generazione post-bellica, disillusa dalla barbarie e dalle atrocità dell’umano nonché smarrita tra i meandri di uno sconvolgimento etico-sociale dalla portata epocale. Sono queste poesie della tolleranza e del rifiuto della violenza, ma anche testi che parlano d’amore e di un profondo senso civico per la propria patria e nazione. Zuska muove la propria ricerca tra composizione, movimento gestuale e poesia. Fa dialogare le figure dei tre artisti adottando la forma della danza contemporanea, espressione libera dalle imposizioni della tradizione coreutica, per inscenare una coreografia che collega tematiche e simbologie adottate. Il movimento e la danza diventano allusione dell’incorporea parola mentre allo spettatore spetta il compito di ritrovare la citazione all’interno della composizione. L’intervento, oltre a introdurre brevemente l’opera del coreografo ceco, si concentrerà sull’analisi stilistica e artistico-coreutica di una delle poesie in musica presenti nel balletto. Nevidomá dívka (La ragazza che non vede) di Karel Kryl sarà tradotta e analizzata non solo da un punto di vista formale ma anche transdisciplinare nel tentativo di far emergere ed esplicitare le corrispondenze che rendono possibile quel particolare scambio intersemiotico tra poesia e gestualità degli interpreti.
Volume degli Atti delle Rencontres de l’Archet 2018, 2018
Nel poema Tiepolo’s Hound (Il Levriero di Tiepolo) Derek Walcott sovrappone la storia di Camille ... more Nel poema Tiepolo’s Hound (Il Levriero di Tiepolo) Derek Walcott sovrappone la storia di Camille Pissarro, pittore francese di origini caraibiche, a quella di un suo alter-ego che, tormentato dalla “vampa di luce” sulla coscia di un levriero intravista in un quadro in esposizione al Metropolitan Museum of Art, non riesce a ricordare se è da attribuire a Tiepolo o a Veronese. Le vicende offrono lo spunto per riflettere su temi cari alla poetica walcottiana, quali l’esilio, l’idea di rappresentazione identitaria e il ruolo e il significato dell’arte e del processo artistico nel “nuovo” e nel “vecchio mondo”, e quindi nei Caraibi e in Europa.
Fine ultimo di questo intervento sarà quello d’indagare, in un primo momento, quel particolare rispecchiamento che Walcott suggerisce tra il proprio percorso artistico e quello di Pissarro per poi passare all’analisi della de-strutturazione di forme e strutture poetiche operata in relazione all’organizzazione e alle tematiche delle tele che lo ispirano. Infine si esamineranno gli itinerari di riflessione identitaria che l’autore propone nel tentativo di “rappresentare” una regione che non può esimersi dal trascurare i fardelli del passato coloniale, ma neppure il presente, contraddistinto da popoli dai retaggi plurimi ed eterogenei.
CAE102_Mantellato_supplemental_material for (Re)Playing Shakespeare through modern dance: Youri V... more CAE102_Mantellato_supplemental_material for (Re)Playing Shakespeare through modern dance: Youri Vámos's Romeo and Juliet by Mattia Mantellato in Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2020
This article discusses Youri Vámos’s 1997 modern-dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juli... more This article discusses Youri Vámos’s 1997 modern-dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines the shift from Renaissance Verona to the twentieth century; his choreographic architecture within physical and spatial ‘partitions’, and his contemporary-dance vocabulary, which fuses classical technique with modern gestures and movements. The lovers are interpreted by the youngest, least experienced dancers in the ensemble, while the dramatisation shifts between irony and tragedy, following a succession of intersemiotic translations of the text and stylistic reworkings. The article concludes with a study of the lovers’ pas de deux, comparing their first encounter and the ballet’s tragic conclusion.
Le Simplegadi, 2018
This article aims to demonstrate how the notions of identity representation and ecological narrat... more This article aims to demonstrate how the notions of identity representation and ecological narrative complement each other in defining both the characters and stories that Caribbean writer Derek Walcott sketches in his well-known epic Omeros. In tune with the theories that have shaped “literary ecology”, this study displays the symbolic role the natural and animistic world plays in the poem. Walcottian protagonists are lost in an “edge of the world” they perceive as hostile. By presenting the hybrid cultural background that characterises the West Indian space, this article addresses two emblematic episodes of Walcottian Omeros and focuses on the uncovering of truths the Caribbean land has concealed from human understanding. It is only through reconciliation with nature that once-colonised peoples are capable of accepting their colonial legacy and finally setting down roots in a place they can call home.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2017
The aim of this paper is to show how the poetry and art of Caribbean writer Derek Walcott (1930-2... more The aim of this paper is to show how the poetry and art of Caribbean writer Derek Walcott (1930-2017) tends to manifest and substantiate the desirable cultural transformation promoted by the work of the American anthropologist and scholar Riane Eisler. The recognition and the exaltation of symbols connected to the feminine world stand at the core of Walcott's masterpiece Omeros. In a creative mutual dialogue between different genres and identities, the Caribbean author materialises Eisler's attempts to forge a type of society based on a new partnership ethic. In a second perspective, this paper analyses how Walcott's work opens the path to possible creative interdisciplinary approaches in the world of the arts. In my own contribution, as a professional dancer and choreographer, I have tried to " give voice " through movements to some episodes relating to the feminine included in Omeros.
A multimodal and dance-theatre adaptation of one of the most celebrated poems written by the Cari... more A multimodal and dance-theatre adaptation of one of the most celebrated poems written by the Caribbean writer, playwright and artist Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize for literature in 1992). Mattia Mantellato's interdisciplinary project aims at connecting dance and literature, giving voice through gestures and movements to incorporeal and highly imaginative visual verses. The Schooner Flight recounts the adventures of the sailor Shabine, it examines the representation of a Caribbean identity, the confrontation with the colonial past and domination, the power of the creative imagination and the potential for a collective redeem and liberation. The choreography works on a double track because it translates Walcott's ideas and context, and simultaneously interplays with the spaces, borders and edging territories in which the interpreters of the work are living and experiencing: the cross-cultural Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia.
The video-abstract presents my PhD project titled "Caribbean decolonisations: Derek Walcott's nar... more The video-abstract presents my PhD project titled "Caribbean decolonisations: Derek Walcott's narrative rewritings and artistic encounters"
6 views
This project is the result of a partnership collaboration between the University of Malta (Prof. ... more This project is the result of a partnership collaboration between the University of Malta (Prof. Antoinette Camilleri-Grima) and the University of Udine (Dr. Mattia Mantellato), in cooperation with Heritage Malta and the Partnership Studies Group based at the University of Udine, a visualising and thought-provoking experience that “bridges the divide” between apparently different cultures, identities and scenarios at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea.
It is a bilingual, multimodal and transdisciplinary project that merges together dance, music and literature. The goal is to break up epistemic and canonical boundaries between languages, disciplines and the arts, in order to embrace an intricate and unpredictable multimodal dialogue, which reflects the complexity of today's wor(l)d societies.
1 views
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
This book focuses on Derek Walcott's literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique... more This book focuses on Derek Walcott's literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique has depicted the Nobel Prize laureate as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century world. This, however, devalues his fundamental contribution to the realm of Caribbean theatre and art. The text examines Walcott's multimodal production, a combination of West Indian folkloric forms and Western-oriented structures and themes, by discussing three of his works - two plays, The Joker of Seville and Pantomime, and a long poem, Tiepolo's Hound. These epitomise respectively a response to Spanish, English, and French cultural legacies in the New World as postcolonial re-writings of Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, and Camille Pissarro's stories. Following Quijano and Mignolo's decolonial approaches and Riane Eisler's partnership perspective, the book uncovers the strategies used by Walcott to respond to the colonial matrix of power.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
Drawing from decolonial thinking and non-binary studies, and from Riane Eisler’s biocultural part... more Drawing from decolonial thinking and non-binary studies, and from Riane Eisler’s biocultural partnership-dominator approach, this paper focuses on the power of the unpredictable encounters and the dialogic wor(l)d in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Whilst most postcolonial literary critique stresses the violent divisions at the core of the different stories in the novel, my analysis demonstrates how narrative, linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries are suspended in an unmarked territory in which the cycles of nature re-establish the sacred meaning of life, human consciousness and its relationship with all creations. Coetzee wittingly portrays the inconsistency of colonial frontiers in the Magistrate’s self-destabilising quest and his uncertain understanding of the “barbarian” systems of signs, embodied in the alien Otherness of the girl. In this sense, my analysis reads the novel as a partnership quest that reveals profound spiritual truths and dissolves the constraints of Western dominator outposts and their borders.
Forum, 2020
To celebrate the short experience of the Federal government of the West Indies in April 1958, the... more To celebrate the short experience of the Federal government of the West Indies in April 1958, the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was commissioned to work on a play that would capture the shared values and cultural unity of his multifaceted and heterogenous community. This “massive undertaking” led to the production of Drums and Colours, an epic pageant covering four hundred and fifty years of Caribbean history through the depiction of four emblematic characters linked to the Antillean archipelago: Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Toussaint L’Ouverture and George William Gordon. Walcott wanted to decolonise the narratives of Western literary “canon” in re-writing these characters according to a new perspective. At the same time, he presented original unknown heroes and “dispossessed voices” and their unpredictable encounters shaping the “open” hybridity and schizophrenic reality of the Caribbean. I will study how Walcott reverses the carnivalesque West Indian performance in a destabilising “theatre within theatre”. I will show how paintings, dances and songs articulate the colourful rhythms of tribal drums in a creative form that unbridles conventional artistic practices, thus enriching our ecosophical perception of reality.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022
The book challenges the myth of the neutrality and detachment of the scholar. Its strength lies i... more The book challenges the myth of the neutrality and detachment of the scholar. Its strength lies in its dynamic, engaging and passionate participation in the meeting of texts and words of different genres, geographical areas and cultures, in the pluralistic diversity of the themes explored, in its fundamental and creative relations with ecosophy, ethnophilology, ecofeminism, system theory and ecolinguistics. It brings together renowned international scholars to focus on postcolonial, ecocritical, mythical, and archetypal studies of literature, education and its partnership mediation, applied linguistics and plurilingual education.
Editors: Antonella Riem Natale & Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.
Contributors: Valentina Boschian Bailo; Elisa Bertoldi; Nicholas Birns; Maria Bortoluzzi; Mark Cladis; Gillian G. Tan; Coral Ann Howells; Tony Hughes-d’Aeth; Paul Kane; Mattia Mantellato; Lyn Mccredden; Antonella Riem Natale; Deborah Saidero; Janet Todd.
A Note from the Editors: The book expands the field of ecocritical, ecosustainable and partnership studies. It provides a wide range of analysis, creative writings and research on the relationship between human and more-than-human encounters; it promotes new eco-sustainable approaches to education; it analyses today’s complex wor(l)d from a gender-balanced, caring and peaceful lens. It brings together the work and research of known scholars worldwide but also emerging young researchers.
Le Simplegadi, 21, 23: 51-69, 2023
This essay focuses on Alexander Ekman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an ambitious dance-theatre pro... more This essay focuses on Alexander Ekman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an ambitious dance-theatre project that the renowned Swedish dancer and choreographer produced for the Royal Swedish Opera of Stockholm in 2015. Ekman’s performance “reverses” Shakespeare’s comedy by bringing on
stage the traditional Swedish midsummer festival with its ring dances around the maypole, while mixing ballet with chants, popular rites and
new technological devices. In my twofold analysis, I focus first on Ekman’s
innovative choreographic “texture” which, despite the choreographer’s assertion that it is completely detached from Shakespeare’s story, is in reality
a close reproduction or “play” between reality (Act I) and dream (Act II).
Second, I show how drawing from Shakespearian themes, Ekman destabilises world dominator and patriarchal views in order to embrace imaginative partnership visions of reality (Eisler 1988), which have much to say about our most intimate and concealed truths.
Le Simplegadi, 2022
This article reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from an “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Ga... more This article reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from an “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Garrard 2004) and “blue” (Hau’ofa 2008; Ingersoll 2016; Mathieson 2021) or ‘water’ perspective. It focuses on Eliot’s magical and aesthetic (r)evolutions depicting the sterility and degradation of life after World War I. I focus on three episodes that mix modern expressions and arts with highly evocative and spiritual forces coming from Eliot’s American heritage and his interest in Eastern religions and philosophies. Madame Sosostris’s reading of the ‘wicked’ cards becomes in this way a Modernist dance of ‘liquid’ archetypes. Tiresias, the prophet and true ‘seer’ evokes a Cubist painting while substantiating the need for fluid and more positive encounters in our life. The three-time beating refrain in the Shanti prayer epitomises the rhythm of water-dropping, the expected coming of water that will heal and re-connect humanity with the ‘One life’. In this “undisciplined” (Benozzo 2010) interpretation, I read The Waste Land as a prayer for water, a communal and “partnership” (Eisler 1988; Eisler & Fry 2019) claim for regeneration and transformation, in the acknowledgement that we, humans, are just one side of the spiralling and cosmic music of the world.
US-China Education Review B, 2022
The demographics of the Mediterranean islands like Malta have changed drastically in the last 10 ... more The demographics of the Mediterranean islands like Malta have changed drastically in the last 10 years mainly due to migration flows from the south and east. During the scholastic year 2018-2019, Maltese schools had a 12% non-Maltese population overall, but in some coastal areas, this meant an 80% shift to a cohort of non-Maltese students. Teachers have been abruptly faced with the need to adopt multicultural and inclusive pedagogical approaches for which they did not feel they were fully equipped. This article describes the creation of a multimodal video production aimed at filling in this gap. It is based on the Partnership Studies philosophy, proposed and expounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler, and on the Blue Option, a cooperative and proactive approach that looks at the "sea" as a space for encounter, understanding, and new intercultural awareness. The video has been tested with two groups of teachers in training, in order to investigate whether, and in what ways, it inspires student-teachers to express empathy with the migrants. Positive results have been extrapolated from the written reflections of the participants.
Quaderni di Semantica, 2022
This paper analyses Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (Ihimaera [1987]), one of the most renowned M... more This paper analyses Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (Ihimaera [1987]), one of the most renowned Māori novels, from a twofold perspective: first, through an ecologically-oriented "blue option" (Hau’ofa [2008], Ingersoll [2016], Mathieson [2021]), an exciting and provocative slant that emerged in the humanities as a framework to investigate sea literatures and cultures of the ocean, and second, through a "partnership thought" (Eisler [1988]; [1995]; [2002], Eisler - Fry [2019]), a transformational approach propounded by the social theorist and activist Riane Eisler on the urgent need to re-think relationships between individuals, communities and the environment (Riem - Thieme [2020], Riem - Hughes-d’Aeth [2022]). The Whale Rider is a powerful decolonial (Quijano [2007], Mignolo [2012]) story that recounts the adventures of Kahu, the female descendent of a strict patriarchal Māori community, who will have to re-establish not only the sacred role of women within her society but also revive the tribe’s ancestral bond with the more-than-human world (Hubbel - Ryan [2021]). In tune with the Māori spiralling perception of life, the analysis uncovers Ihimaera’s narrative strategies in depicting an ever shifting "tidalectic" (Brathwaite [1992]) reality in which gender boundaries, mythical genealogies and natural manifestations are re-drawn in light of a more interrelated and peaceful oceanic future. The Whale Rider presents an insightful re-writing of Western-European and Northern Atlantic postcolonial views through an alter-native and "blue" text that depicts an-Other and more ecologically sustainable partnership world.
Quaderni di Semantica, 2022
In the last decade, unprecedented migration flows from the southern shores of the Mediterranean S... more In the last decade, unprecedented migration flows from the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea northwards resulted in a significant change in the ethnic and cultural composition of school populations in several European countries, not least in Malta. Teachers were faced with a wave of cultural and linguistic diversity for which they felt unprepared. Considering that displacement flows are expected to continue in the future, negative perspectives on migration need to be revised. The project Bridging the Divide: Partnership and Migration was an attempt to explore whether an aesthetic experience can stimulate empathy, as part of teachers’ professional development. In line with the partnership approach, promoted by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler, this article details the creation of a multimodal video production, bringing together dance, music and poetry in a visualising experience that speaks about migration in the Mediterranean Sea. The project was later implemented by two focus group sessions who discussed and produced written meditations. From the participants’ answers we identified reflections that showed how a multimodal experience can work successfully in stimulating empathy with the migrant, so as to promote partnership education in teachers’ professional development.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2022
Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the... more Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the biocultural partnership-dominator model propounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler (1987; Eisler, Fry 2019), this essay explores The Moor’s Pavane (1949), one of the most successful dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello by the Mexican-American emigree, dancer and choreographer José Limon (1908-1972). In this paper I will draw a parallel between the Bard’s text and Limon’s dance composition to show how textual and embodied forms can merge and become a perfect medium for the displaying of all nuances in human ‘nature’, desires, and relations. In the world of ballet, the performance was revolutionary because it presented for the first time Limon’s original technique, a complex re-working of Humphrey and Weidman’s practices and a mixture of different dance-styles and tempos. The Pavane, a rigidly fixed court dance performed in Northern Italy around the Renaissance period, becomes the means through which Limon portrays the changing of order and stability of Shakespeare’s plot, so as to debunk the hypocrisy of Elizabethan society and embody Othello’s falling into Iago’s trap. In my analysis, I will explore how Limon transposed and decolonised the Shakespearean tragedy through highly innovative fall-recovery movements, iconic gestures, and precise geometrical patterns. I will focus in particular on Limon’s choice to reduce the intricate plot to a four-hand partnership dance between two different and yet parallel couples, Othello-Desdemona and Emilia-Iago. The aim of my analysis is to show how Limon slowly breaks up the Pavane’s immutable tempo in order to provide a rhythmical crescendo of movements that express the tensions, disillusionment and final choices of the main protagonists.
MRER, 2021
This article discusses the implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference's (CEFR) ... more This article discusses the implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference's (CEFR) set of descriptors relating to 'personal response to creative texts' in the teaching of Maltese as a Foreign Language (MFL). The new volume of the CEFR's Companion Volume, published in 2018, included a number of new descriptors, among which are those related to learners' response to creative texts. As an initial application of this new set of descriptors to MFL, we created an intermedial video production involving poetry, music and dance, that brings to the fore issues of migration. The video stimulates a reflection on humanity's collective history, and suggests the idea that we all are descendants of people who came from the sea. In addition to the highly motivational aspect of the task, it has helped us estimate the difficulty of such a task in the context of MFL. We also obtained some insight into the application of the relevant descriptors for this part of the MFL syllabus.
Parole Rubate, 2020
Nel maggio del 2007 l’allora direttore del balletto del Teatro Nazionale di Praga, Petr Zuska, al... more Nel maggio del 2007 l’allora direttore del balletto del Teatro Nazionale di Praga, Petr Zuska, allestisce per le scene della Repubblica Ceca un’opera dal titolo Solo pro tri, danza o assolo per tre. È questo l’inizio di un successo che, oltre a consacrare la carriera coreografica di Zuska, fonde in un unicum artistico le storie di vita e i testi di tre cantautori d’eccezione del panorama culturale slavo ed europeo degli anni ’60 e ’70 del secolo scorso: il belga Jacques Brel, il russo Vladimír Vysockij e il ceco Karel Kryl. La scelta non è casuale, ma riverbera la volontà di esplicitare, attraverso il linguaggio della danza, gli istinti e gli animi di quella particolare generazione post-bellica, disillusa dalla barbarie e dalle atrocità dell’umano nonché smarrita tra i meandri di uno sconvolgimento etico-sociale dalla portata epocale. Sono queste poesie della tolleranza e del rifiuto della violenza, ma anche testi che parlano d’amore e di un profondo senso civico per la propria patria e nazione. Zuska muove la propria ricerca tra composizione, movimento gestuale e poesia. Fa dialogare le figure dei tre artisti adottando la forma della danza contemporanea, espressione libera dalle imposizioni della tradizione coreutica, per inscenare una coreografia che collega tematiche e simbologie adottate. Il movimento e la danza diventano allusione dell’incorporea parola mentre allo spettatore spetta il compito di ritrovare la citazione all’interno della composizione. L’intervento, oltre a introdurre brevemente l’opera del coreografo ceco, si concentrerà sull’analisi stilistica e artistico-coreutica di una delle poesie in musica presenti nel balletto. Nevidomá dívka (La ragazza che non vede) di Karel Kryl sarà tradotta e analizzata non solo da un punto di vista formale ma anche transdisciplinare nel tentativo di far emergere ed esplicitare le corrispondenze che rendono possibile quel particolare scambio intersemiotico tra poesia e gestualità degli interpreti.
Volume degli Atti delle Rencontres de l’Archet 2018, 2018
Nel poema Tiepolo’s Hound (Il Levriero di Tiepolo) Derek Walcott sovrappone la storia di Camille ... more Nel poema Tiepolo’s Hound (Il Levriero di Tiepolo) Derek Walcott sovrappone la storia di Camille Pissarro, pittore francese di origini caraibiche, a quella di un suo alter-ego che, tormentato dalla “vampa di luce” sulla coscia di un levriero intravista in un quadro in esposizione al Metropolitan Museum of Art, non riesce a ricordare se è da attribuire a Tiepolo o a Veronese. Le vicende offrono lo spunto per riflettere su temi cari alla poetica walcottiana, quali l’esilio, l’idea di rappresentazione identitaria e il ruolo e il significato dell’arte e del processo artistico nel “nuovo” e nel “vecchio mondo”, e quindi nei Caraibi e in Europa.
Fine ultimo di questo intervento sarà quello d’indagare, in un primo momento, quel particolare rispecchiamento che Walcott suggerisce tra il proprio percorso artistico e quello di Pissarro per poi passare all’analisi della de-strutturazione di forme e strutture poetiche operata in relazione all’organizzazione e alle tematiche delle tele che lo ispirano. Infine si esamineranno gli itinerari di riflessione identitaria che l’autore propone nel tentativo di “rappresentare” una regione che non può esimersi dal trascurare i fardelli del passato coloniale, ma neppure il presente, contraddistinto da popoli dai retaggi plurimi ed eterogenei.
CAE102_Mantellato_supplemental_material for (Re)Playing Shakespeare through modern dance: Youri V... more CAE102_Mantellato_supplemental_material for (Re)Playing Shakespeare through modern dance: Youri Vámos's Romeo and Juliet by Mattia Mantellato in Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies
Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2020
This article discusses Youri Vámos’s 1997 modern-dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juli... more This article discusses Youri Vámos’s 1997 modern-dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines the shift from Renaissance Verona to the twentieth century; his choreographic architecture within physical and spatial ‘partitions’, and his contemporary-dance vocabulary, which fuses classical technique with modern gestures and movements. The lovers are interpreted by the youngest, least experienced dancers in the ensemble, while the dramatisation shifts between irony and tragedy, following a succession of intersemiotic translations of the text and stylistic reworkings. The article concludes with a study of the lovers’ pas de deux, comparing their first encounter and the ballet’s tragic conclusion.
Le Simplegadi, 2018
This article aims to demonstrate how the notions of identity representation and ecological narrat... more This article aims to demonstrate how the notions of identity representation and ecological narrative complement each other in defining both the characters and stories that Caribbean writer Derek Walcott sketches in his well-known epic Omeros. In tune with the theories that have shaped “literary ecology”, this study displays the symbolic role the natural and animistic world plays in the poem. Walcottian protagonists are lost in an “edge of the world” they perceive as hostile. By presenting the hybrid cultural background that characterises the West Indian space, this article addresses two emblematic episodes of Walcottian Omeros and focuses on the uncovering of truths the Caribbean land has concealed from human understanding. It is only through reconciliation with nature that once-colonised peoples are capable of accepting their colonial legacy and finally setting down roots in a place they can call home.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2017
The aim of this paper is to show how the poetry and art of Caribbean writer Derek Walcott (1930-2... more The aim of this paper is to show how the poetry and art of Caribbean writer Derek Walcott (1930-2017) tends to manifest and substantiate the desirable cultural transformation promoted by the work of the American anthropologist and scholar Riane Eisler. The recognition and the exaltation of symbols connected to the feminine world stand at the core of Walcott's masterpiece Omeros. In a creative mutual dialogue between different genres and identities, the Caribbean author materialises Eisler's attempts to forge a type of society based on a new partnership ethic. In a second perspective, this paper analyses how Walcott's work opens the path to possible creative interdisciplinary approaches in the world of the arts. In my own contribution, as a professional dancer and choreographer, I have tried to " give voice " through movements to some episodes relating to the feminine included in Omeros.
Mantellato, 2021
Caribbean Decolonisations: Derek Walcott's Narrative Rewritings and Artistic Encounters