Currently under development, Taranta is a theatrical piece written in English and Italian (with English subtitles) by Patrizia Perocco and Roberto Trippini.
The music, by Andrea Quintarelli, is a mix of traditional pizzica-taranta themes and modern reinterpretations. It is choreographed by Anna Lombardi and directed by Patrizia Perocco and Anna Lombardi.
Taranta is a dramatized version of the Italian folk ritual, the Taranta dance, a cathartic dance performed to shake off the pain of living. The story revolves around the common predicament of three generations of women, a daughter, a mother and a grandmother, who all feels the pain of living. It starts in present-day New York and goes back to the badlands of Puglia at the beginning of 1900.
A visceral and visionary theatrical piece, then, which peels away historical and cultural accretions to uncover the beating heart of existence - as rendered by a primeval music with deep roots in the West’s pagan past. Some scholars have even traced it all the way back to the ancient Greek myth of Arachnae, the young princess cursed out of jealousy by the goddess Athena to become a spider and hang from a tree. As Athens’ young virgins were grasped by euphoric suicide mania and began to hang themselves from trees, a remedy was found: allowing them to engage in orgiastic rites honouring Dionysus.
In southern Italy, this tradition was appropriated by the native people of the Puglia region and mutated into a cathartic dance in which the sufferer pretends to have been bitten by a tarantula and dances so as to sweat off the poison. The sufferer was more often than not a woman taking part in the summer harvest – and the real cause of the suffering lay elsewhere. In a conservative rural culture revolving around magical and religious beliefs, this cathartic dance offered a socially acceptable ritual allowing downtrodden and oppressed women to express their sexual frustrations and existential pains. The tarantula’s bite was pretext for them to reach through frantic dancing a state of blissful trance in which personal pain and malaise were sloughed off and serenity regained.
So entrenched had the taranta dance become that the Catholic Church appropriated it as one of its rites – still performed to this day in the churches of Puglia – in which the tarantulata (the sufferer of the tarantula’s bite), all dressed in white, begins to dance within a corner of the church delimited by chanting women and fast-playing musicians, and keeps dancing and dancing till totally exhausted – and cured of the deep unhappiness or personal trauma which caused her to be declared tarantulata. Prayers of thanks are then addressed to St Paul, revered in the Bible as the healer of snake bites - and none other than the direct successor of Dionysus in the Christian pantheon.
The familiar tarantella dance performed nowadays by folk groups is but a stylized and domesticated version of what always tended to the wild and the nakedly erotic. The original pizzica taranta cathartic dance mimes both the sensual slithering of the tarantula on the ground and the frenzied efforts to crush it underfoot. The dancer shakes and wiggles and sways as if as if bitten by the poisonous tarantula spider (thence its name), faster and faster, till reaching a state of trance and blissful catharsis. The dance is thus at once a symptom and a cure. It is all about pain and terror, desire and aggression, love and survival...
A choreographic study of the taranta dance has been presented at the Abrons Arts Center on October 7th, 2006. Click here to view the video.
A reading is scheduled at the West End Theatre at the end of April 2007, sponsored by the Six Figures Theater Company.
A showcase of the full production will be presented at the end of June 2007, in New York City.
