Performing Ecstasies is an e-collection of papers presented at the homonymous conference and festival held in October of 2000 in Los Angeles, California. This anthology first appeared in print in 2005 but is now free to download at http://luisadg.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Performing-Ecstasies-VOLUME-LuisaDelGiudice.pdf. A list of black-and-white illustrations introduces us to this e-book, while information on contributors along with the conference and festival program and photographs are located, as appendices, at its end.
In the forward, Nancy Van Deusen explains how this volume is the outcome of a series of ongoing, interdisciplinary collaborations of a cross-cultural nature. Massimo Roscigno, Consul General of Italy, prefaces the writings with a warm, pro-Italian greeting. In her introduction and acknowledgements Luisa Del Giudice refers to specific individuals and also to organizations that inspired and supported the conference and its events, stressing how this "old" idea was meant not only to be theoretical but also to be embraced by practical and tangible examples, such as, for example, music-dance performances and photo exhibitions. As the editor, she also summarizes and presents each of the contributions that follow.
Chapter 1, "Performed Ecstasies and Trance in Antiquity," consists of two units, “The Protean Performer: Mimesis and Identity in Late Antique Discussions of the Theater,” and “Describing Ecstasy on the North African Rim in Late Antiquity.” This chapter shows how writings can reveal a powerful performance tradition through which artists and audiences reach ecstasy. They emphasize the secrets of music's extraordinary "divine" power, which, through specific patterns and repetitions, manages to transform and even addict both listeners and performers.
Chapter 2: "Trance and Healing" contains “Ecstasis in Healing: Practices in Southern Italy and Greece from Antiquity to the Present,” “Dancing towards Well-being: Reflections on the Pizzica in Contemporary Salento, Italy,” and “Reconstructing the Sense of Presence: Tarantula, Arlìa and Dance.” Through a comparative, both synchronic and diachronic perspective, these sub-chapters help us understand the various expressions of the mystery surrounding the fatal spider's bite within a specific society. They examine various cases of religious healing sought by means of ecstasy, and focus on the psychological and social conditions that lie at the heart of such ritual practices (which have, incidentally, been revived).
Chapter 3, "Africa and African Musical Crossroads," includes three entries: “The Sounds of Religion: A Mawlid of Kenadsa,” “The Music of the Gnawa of Morocco: A Journey with the Other into the Elsewhere,” and “Development and Hypnotic Performance of an African Lamellaphone in the Salentine Area: The Fina Case Study.” These essays focus on ceremonial saint feasts and show how the voice of the chanters restores an acoustic universe in rituals that consolidate community ties through the vigor and inspiration gained from contact with spiritual energies. Toward that end, music and dance are significant, and specific musical instruments remarkably adapt to the imagination of the musicians as if they were "speaking" to them.
Chapter 4, "On Musicians, Singers and Dancers," contains the following subchapters: "‘My Soul's There Already and My Heart's on Its Way’: Portuguese Women's Pilgrimage Drum Songs,” “For Luigi Stifani,” and “Pizzica Tarantata: Reflections of a Violin Player.” Topics investigated in this entry include religious processions accompanied by music and dance as well as specific performers-interpreters of the spider myth. Narratives and detailed descriptions show how "proper" participants do not need to know the music through the brain but rather play it with the heart.
Chapter 5, "Italian Rituals of Healing, Devotion and Magic," encompasses “Dance of the Earth,” “Venturing Identity: Performing Ecstasy in the Rite of the Guglia (Basilicata, Italy),” and “Devotion, Music, and Rite in Southern Italy: The Madonna del Pollino Festival.” Music and dance are explored here along with the choreographic and symbolic dimensions of rituals, as elements indissolubly bound to each other as well as to the ceremonial context of several feasts. The transformation of ritual cultures and the way they continue to mark certain areas and participants are also discussed here, arriving at the conclusion that, after all, meaning is brought to a certain region by owning "a" history.
The last chapter, titled "Cultural Performance and Revival," includes the following: “Imagining the Strega: Folklore Reclamation and the Construction of Italian American Witchcraft,” “García Lorca and the Duende,” and “Folk Revival and the Culture of Tarantismo in the Salento.” Here, Italian and Italian American revivals are examined as constructions that combine traditional folk beliefs and practices to create new faiths serving the needs of contemporary Italian/Italian American spiritual seekers. In addition, Lorca is explored as someone who tried to theorize how a profane trance, namely a manifestation of musical emotion, goes beyond a religious context via a mysterious quality that has nothing to do with technical mastery and artistic discipline.
Overall, this anthology is a genuine example of thick ethnography, comprised of a wealth of oral histories, ornamented by many interesting, specific examples and descriptions, and supported by black-and-white photographs. Folk rites and ceremonies (with a profound emphasis on tarantism), history and criticism, ecstatic music and dance, tradition and revival, modernity and adaptation, ritual healing along with the therapeutic and religious uses of folklore, are among the topics that are unraveled. As a result, folklorists, anthropologists, musicologists, and scholars of religion, gender, and ritual can surely benefit by reading these essays focused on how identity is engaged through ecstasy.
As is always the case with performances that are rendered in words, visual elements, such as sample videos of the performances and other cultural events surrounding the conference, would be ideal. Perhaps now that the volume is available online, such an option could be explored. The Mediterranean dimension of this project is clear as the writings do embrace examples from several regions, even though most deal with Italy. As a result, analogies from antiquity to today could be traced in ritual practices that are widespread in this part of the world.
Can folklore be used to achieve communal and esoteric balance? Yes, if we agree with the arguments presented in this work, since culture and music do evolve, adapt, embrace, and enfold many disparate elements in remarkably resilient ways. Most importantly, it dances us back to communal self-healing by promoting well-being as well as publicly celebrating amalgams of cultural identity, notably, in this volume, at Mediterranean crossroads that are enduring mosaics of ecstasies performed.
--------
[Review length: 1053 words • Review posted on September 26, 2014]