Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino at Button Factory

Ever been bitten by a tarantula? In Puglia, right down in the heel of Southern Italy’s boot, farm labourers in the last millennium developed a unique antidote. Its called pizzica tarantata, a feverish dance that was said to drive the spider’s toxin from the dancer’s body.

These days, tarantata is a music and dance tradition as robust as our own, and Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino are its most exciting interpreters.  Established in 1975 by its current leader’s father, Its been a heady few years for Mauro Durante, who has repurposed the old trance music for a new Italian generation, and stadium audiences are a given at the hugely popular Notte della Taranta festival in their native Salento....

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Ever been bitten by a tarantula? In Puglia, right down in the heel of Southern Italy’s boot, farm labourers in the last millennium developed a unique antidote. Its called pizzica tarantata, a feverish dance that was said to drive the spider’s toxin from the dancer’s body.

These days, tarantata is a music and dance tradition as robust as our own, and Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino are its most exciting interpreters.  Established in 1975 by its current leader’s father, Its been a heady few years for Mauro Durante, who has repurposed the old trance music for a new Italian generation, and stadium audiences are a given at the hugely popular Notte della Taranta festival in their native Salento.
They’ve had a meteoric rise elsewhere too, with euphoric recent performances at WOMAD and Globalfest NY on foot of their acclaimed 2012 release Pizzica Indiavolata. This is music with energy and passion, driven forward by the compelling groove of the tamburello, the frame drum that recalls Puglia’s historical connections across the med to the Arabic world, along with fiddle, bouzouki, accordion and zampogna, the roughhewn Italian bagpipes fashioned from a whole goat hide. The voice of Maria Mazzotta adds a primal quality that evokes times past, even though the songs are of the moment, raging against the economic privations that, as for us, face many in Southern Italy.  Tarantata is a music of catharsis, never needed more than today.
And there will be dancing, as the elegant Silvia Perrone brings us the old dances, demonstrating that the tarantula’s bite is far from fatal. On the contrary, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

FURTHER INFO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-IfNJyxA8w

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