Tarantella (original) (raw)

The performance will take place in the Lombardy poplar grove on the central lawn, most likely in collaboration with the San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council, with which we are developing an ongoing collaboration called "Harvest of Secrets," a celebration of urban trees.

We are planning to present site-specific performances for the community during the Summer and early Fall of 2006, and to present the fully-staged theatrical production in Fall 2006 or Spring 2007.

Choreographic Starting Point

The choreographic starting point and galvanizing kernels for this project are a number of ancient, goddess-based, self-healing dance forms that originated in Africa and Egypt and have persisted throughout history in many cultures and religions. These dance forms are found in the myths, rituals, celebrations and popular dance expressions of people in both urban and rural settings, and they became deeply integrated into the fabric of daily life. Many of the dance forms migrated to southern Europe through trade, expansion and conquest; much later on they migrated to the New World with the millions of people who came to America looking for a better life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially to the San Francisco Bay Area and other regions of northern California with large immigrant populations.
The other strand of similar dance, and perhaps even the same self-healing dance tradition, came to the Americas from Yoruba African cultural ancestry, musical movement and ritual memory to Cuba , the Caribbean and Brazil, as well as to the United States .

Forms of Tarantella

Three forms of Tarantella dances will be explored and represented in our indoor theater performances: Tarantella de Core- a courting dance for couples, Tarantella Scherma--a martial dueling dance for men: and Tarantella Pizzica, the trance healing dance often danced by women.

In our outdoor participatory performances we will teach and dance Tarantella de Core and tell the story of other two forms.

Ancient Dances related to Tarantella Pizzica

In Egypt these ancient dances go by the name of Zaar; in Algeria , they are called Jarjabou; in Tunisia Stimbali. In Morocco , they are performed by the tribe of the Gnavas, who claim Ethiopia as their country of origin. In Southern Italy they are called Tarantella Pizzica.

The trance dance is a ceremony that aims to harmonize the environment and its participants, it is a form of passing knowledge and healing, ether on a spiritual or psychological level, of problems that may result from suppressed wishes or needs or from some socially-induced repression.

The trance dance is not a form of entertainment, nor it is an exorcism. Its sole aim is to heal the body and help the person. All people who partake in such a ceremony have the duty to support the "sick" person to the best of their abilities.

In the Ethiopian liturgy, the clergy at times dances and the drum is used.

Ancient Measures

As one of the starting points for the creation of new work and choreographic interpretations of ancient dances for modern times, Artship Dance/Theater is exploring very old measuring and surveying systems used all over the world. We are particularly interested in a possible flow of knowledge regarding these systems from Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Ancient Egypt into the Mediterranean Basin and how exchanges between Africa, Asia and Europe may have influenced ancient measuring methods.

Fathom: Distance from fingertip to fingertip of outstretched arms, approximately six feet.
Bracca: Italian for arm, length of approximately a yard.
Cubit: A distance from the elbow to the tip of fingers, 17.5 inches. The cubit was divided into seven palms or 28 fingers.
Finger: 3/4 of an inch, subdivision in the Cubit system.
Palm: 4 fingers, 3 inches, subdivision in the Cubit system
Span: 3 palms, 9 inches. Cubit system.
Foot : Some ancient Egyptian cubit rods indicated a foot measure the eighteenth finger, about 13,5 inches long. This is the origin of 12-inch foot.
Pace: A step, Roman and biblical measure of approximately a yard.

The exploration of ancient measuring systems is our company's wayof intuiting and feeling timeless values in the bodies of the dancers and in the work we are creating. Elusive notions of measure, movement and sound in humanly-created places, dances and music from primordial time provide the inspirational grounding and greater context for the "Tarantella, Tarantula" performances in both its indoor and outdoor expressions.

Artship Dance/Theater Music

-Emancipating musical communication through a melodic depth using pentatonic and octave scales, (similar to 1,2,3,5,8,� harmonic relationships in nature).

-Sometimes going back to simple utterances of human voice in story telling as a guide to the musical exposition.

-Cultivating music which is not mere accompaniment or incidental music, but an essential layer in counterpoint compositions with visual, dance and theater elements of Artship Dance/Theater productions.

Why We Like Stories?

-Stories evoke panic and recovered closeness.

-In the archaic recesses of our being we ward off unbearable levels of irrational anxiety through the need for and the mechanisms of personification.

-To personify is to represent things or abstractions as having a personal nature, embodied in personal qualities.

-When personification acquires duration, it begins to exist in time, and then a rudimentary story begins. This embryonic story, an individual inkling, finds great relief in joining the established flow of existing stories and well-known myths. That is why children love hearing old stories over and over again.

Although the word personification implies a human face or figure, the investment of natural and human-made objects and animals with certain qualities of soul or spirit, i.e., animism, are manifestations of the same process.

The phenomenon of Tarantism, the multi-faceted manifestation of illnesses and �moods� caused by the bites of Tarantula spider, and its cure through dance of Tarantella, are living examples of the process of personification. In the ritualized interplay of affliction and recovery, reintegration of the affected person into the community takes place through dance.

The positive side of this personifying, a story-seeking function, is to give us the sense of belonging, of community, of recovered closeness.

The negative side of the personifying process is investing others with our panic and creating chauvinism, racism and similar manifestations.

Just like the physical body continuously works to keep body fluids moving, temperature almost constant, the stomach acid at manageable levels, etc, so does the psychological self produce compensating, relieving images and non-verbal scenarios, or proto-stories to help us deal with life's complexities.

Continuous interplay of panic and recovered closeness is central in family or community life; it never goes away. Just as babies need continuous reassurance and feeding, so do adults, but in different ways.

Creating external �community commons� in public places through Culture Making, with a strong value and practice of diversity, will redefine �recovered closeness� for urban dwellers of the 21st century and potentially awaken new levels of inner connectedness.

The Role of Imaginative Function

The inner world of voluntary and involuntary imagining, the imaginative function, may be central to this re-awakening. Our human ability to nurture ourselves through sublimation and dreaming may offer a common link to the archaic layers of anxiety release through personification and enactment. The imaginative process is central to our recovered closeness. We do this nightly in dreams where, through dynamic images and an active process of personification, we self-heal and inadvertently deepen self-knowledge. This personifying function and its manifestation as rudimentary non-verbal sequences, with the potential for stories, is perhaps a starting point to reintroduce meaning, value and to revive ancient processes into contemporary life through enactment and art.