The definition of “tarantella” is contested. As Incoronata Inserra notes, Neapolitan tarantella was a refined music and dance form explored by composers such as Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Rossini, featuring in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and in Connie’s wedding in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, The Godfather (1972). As a spider dance, associated with ancient orgiastic rites in honor of Dionysus and featuring in Ernesto De Martino’s La terra del rimorso (1961) and the associated film, it was a phenomenon of the Apulia region in Italy’s heel that contextualized a pre-Christian system within a Catholic framework. As a legacy of Greek migration, it witnessed how the noble savage encountered a civilizing modernity. Again, in its revival, the associated tammurriata peasant tradition from the southern Campania region of Italy came to center on passionate dance. And, as southern Italians moved northwards to find work, so tarantella came to epitomize the “Southern question” of Italian politics and statehood, symbolic of the poverty-stricken and isolationist areas situated at a distance from the industrialized, cosmopolitan cities of Italy’s center and north. It became part of the identity of migrants from the south, and it expanded, as migrants moved abroad, to take on elements of the New Age, and to become commodified within gypsy-punk and other genres.
Inserra adopts an auto-ethnographic approach to map her account, based on her own background in southern Italy and her participation in dancing, as well as on her workshop experiences with the American-based dancer Alessandra Belloni. She explores revival using Stuart Hall’s observation that globalization increasingly has a reverse localizing effect, below the level of the nation-state, that responds to the loss of identity and sense of belonging. This perspective emerges from interview data in which local practitioners talk about the decontextualization implicit in revival and migration, and about notions of authenticity, tradition, identity, and place.
Her first chapter charts different elements of revival, in which some of those she talks with associate with tarantella’s putative ritual origins while some, such as those in left-wing circles, sidestep any ritual elements. She looks at the more general folk music revival, then zooms in on specific groups, particularly the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. This allows her to illustrate her points by citing pertinent lyrics. She then explores the post-1990s revival, in which the pizzica from Apulia and a reassessment of its rites and legendary spiders have taken center stage. She assesses scholarship, noting how from Gramsci forward interpretations have reflected specific goals--challenging the image of one or other form of music and dance, asserting the secular aspects of revival, understanding locality.
The fine-grain ethnography presented in chapter 2 then explores how festivals operate within the contexts of revival, identity, and place, and how these elements struggle to compete as tourist dollars become important and as interested northerners mix with southerners in Milan and other places. Chapter 3 moves towards cultural/critical studies’ territory, looking in detail at a single musician, Eugenio Bennato, and his recordings. After contextualizing his output by comparing them with those of other musicians, Inserra concludes that revival allows tarantella to become a constructive response to the harsh conditions faced by southern Italy. It constructs an alternative to the exotic imaging of place, but this should be balanced by the observation that revival also risks making tarantella just another commodified form of mass culture. This, I would contend, is evidenced in texts such as the glorious photo book by Tony Rizzo, Obiettivo, Focus on Taranta (Bari: Gelsorosso, 2012); however, our search for the exotic, seen in the frenzied dance to expel the spider’s poison, is equally an aspect of Saidian Orientalism that should be approached critically by scholars.
The “global” part of Global Tarantella is revealed in chapter 4, where the focus moves to North America, to New York and Honolulu, and to the dancer Belloni. “Global,” then, is (sadly) North America. “Cosmopolitanism,” “Mediterranean Volcano,” “World Music,” and “Woman-Centered New Age Practice” become the frames for explorations of Italianness. New Age practices receive scant discussion, with the result that Inserra struggles to balance Belloni’s challenged relationship with the Italian community in New York and her identity narrative. While the first two chapters establish the ethnographic heartland of Italy’s south, the third and fourth chapters play with different representations, one cutting across borders through media representations and the other transporting tarantella and other aspects of Italian identity such as the Black Madonna del Tindari to North America. The result, and the author’s intention, is that tarantella is interpreted for an American audience--an academic audience, but also those who attend workshops and consume music and dance recordings and performances--reconciling more traditional ethnographic folklore (or ethnomusicology) with the reality of the present.
Hence, Inserra’s conclusion: as tarantella is staged through global performances it is translated and transformed, but the job of a folklorist, as a cultural broker, remains to exercise agency in narrating its history and cultural specificity, while taking on responsibilities both toward the local communities who owned and own it as well as for the broader audiences for whom we write. As she puts it, engaged scholars cannot afford to forget “attention, passion, and respect” (176–8).
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[Review length: 859 words • Review posted on July 11, 2018]