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In case of emergency, start dancing

A dose of tarantism will cure those pesky spider bites

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
March 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
High spirits are infectious when the band plays pizzica.
Anyone suffering from arachnophobia may want to be at Archa the evening of April 3 to learn a centuries-old Southern Italian trick for dealing with spider bites — basically, just dance the pain away.
Three days of frenzied plucks to mandolin strings and furious foot-stomping used to do the trick for the energetic victims of this region in a ritual to cure bites from local tarantulas. OK, so the spider’s venom was generally harmless, and didn’t really require an on-the-spot music festival. But who’s to say a nip from a spider isn’t as good a reason as any to start singing and dancing?
Or, in this case, to enjoy a workshop and performance of the ritual music and dance known as tarantism, by the popular Italian folk music group Aioresis.
Tarantism is one of the most well-known forms of pizzica, folk music from the Salento region of Italy (in the “heel of the boot”). Popular during the 16th and 17th centuries, the music and its accompanying dance would begin when a spider-bite victim (usually a woman who had been working in the fields) would call for local musicians to bring their mandolins, violins, accordions and tambourines and play different rhythms around her as she danced until the right rhythm was found and “cured” her.
But the dancing was by no means limited to just the tarantae (the bitten woman). Usually held in public squares, it would draw entire crowds.
“As soon as the tambourine starts playing, your feet move,” says event coordinator and Salento native-cum-Prague resident Anna Leardi of the music’s effects. “I can’t explain it. It’s really like a tarantula’s bitten me, because I can’t stand still!”
Academic theories about the reason for tarantism’s popularity are varied. The most popular is that villagers used it as a way to get around religious edicts that forbade dancing (sort of like Footloose for the rural Renaissance crowd). Other scholars claim that tarantism provided a way for women to express and relieve themselves of sexual desires, or was the entire community’s attempt to continue ancient Bacchanalian rites in a time of Christian domination.
Whatever the music and dance’s latent meanings, tarantism has enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past three decades. In the 1970s, academics began studying the folk music of Southern Italy. Documentary films about Salento and pizzica sparked an international interest in the entertaining tarantism ritual, and demand for performances grew.
Tarantula Pasionata

When: Tuesday, April 3, starting at 5:30
Where: Divadlo Archa
Tickets: 190–280 Kč, available at the venue

Salento natives thought, “Let’s learn more about our culture, since it’s so popular with people outside,” Leardi says, and a local effort began to preserve and invigorate the art form. Elders were interviewed as a new generation learned the lost meaning of song lyrics and the music, the dance steps and the spirit of tarantism.
“Now,” Leardi says, “it’s a national phenomenon.”
Pizzica musical groups perform tarantism and other traditional song styles around the world, and an annual 13-day pizzica festival in Salento draws larger and larger crowds each year —all of which persuaded Leardi that Prague is due for an evening learning about and taking part in tarantism.
The evening of “Tarantula Passionata” will begin with a lesson about the history and culture of the Salento region, pizzica and tarantism. Then Aioresis will lead the audience in a workshop of tarantism dance steps before the exuberant concert of music and dance finally begins. (Aioresis takes its name from one ritual component of tarantism, the aiora, when the tarantae would swing from a rope to symbolically identify herself with the spider dangling from its web.)
The time spent on explanation and demonstration is essential, according to Leardi, because “it’s the phenomenon behind the music that makes it so interesting.” Unfortunately for English-speaking audiences, though, the lecture portion of the evening will be in Italian with only Czech translations.
Leardi is a longtime friend of the Aioresis band members. She was never a member of the group herself, she is quick to point out — “just a dancer in the audience.” She has been promising her friends that she would organize a concert for them in Prague for years, and is looking forward to that promise’s fruition next week. The group and its music, she believes, will be a big hit here.
Leardi recalls one pizzica concert she saw a few years ago in Prague. “When the band was performing,” she says, “the whole crowd was dancing.”

Brooke Edge can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (28/03/2007):

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