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Italian Folk Dance
Alessandra Belloni brings the tarantella into the twenty-first century with techno beats and electric violin
Alessandra Belloni dancing and playing castanets, with Joe Deninzon on violin
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What step dancing is to Ireland, what tango is to Argentina, what flamenco is to Spain, the tarantella is to Italy.
This folk dance’s roots reach deep into Magna Graecian soil, when women performed orgiastic Dionysian rites. In the Middle Ages, women who continued the ritual—which involves frenzied footwork, passionate gesturing and musicians on tambourines, guitars and mandolins—were said to have been poisoned by a venomous spider. In the 1960s, a more modern theory claimed these women had been caught in society’s restrictive web and were fighting against unrequited love and repressed sexual desire.
Now, Alessandra Belloni, artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, presents a modernized version, “Tarantella – Spider Dance,” at ATA Theatre December 20–21 and January 10–11.
Belloni’s tarantella includes techno beats on electric violin (by Joe Deninzon), hip hop, a stilt dancer as Sun God and Death, an aerial performer who lures dancers into her web, masks, singers, modern dancers trained in Graham technique, Ms. Belloni as Athena, and a narrator who weaves these threads into a conclusive story.
“It’s really about how we create a web, and society creates a web, that we get stuck in,” says Ms. Belloni. “Through dance and ecstatic music I show we can get rid of the web.”