Alessandra Belloni and what her music means to me
Alessandra Belloni is a percussionist, singer, dancer, and folklorist from the region of Apulia in southern Italy. Her art is centered on the dance indigenous to Apulia, the tarantella.
She has four CDs of her music out currently: the first was Earth, Sun, and Moon recorded with a folkloric group she founded, I Giullari di Piazza (which roughly translates as 'the town square players'). Then her solo career broke out with Tarantata: Dance of the Ancient Spider, followed by Tarantelli & Canti d'Amore. Her latest CD, Daughter of the Drum, is privately issued. I hope she gets a recording contract again. She is an amazing artist who deserves to be better appreciated. She performs her music with a certain raw intensity. It isn't for people who want their music to be all smooth and safe. Her music is wild, powerful, and very female.
There is more to the tarantella than the conventional story about how the dance was used to cure tarantula bites. Signora Belloni traces its origins back to pre-Christian pagan Greek and Roman women's mysteries. The bite of the spider is allegorical-- the real ailment the tarantella is a cure for, the tarantism, comes from the repression of women's freedom and sexuality in a patriarchal world. For ages women in southern Italy have been gathering and dancing themselves into a frenzy to let their female power out in a safe space for healing. The Greek mythology about the Maenads came from real women who drummed and danced ecstatically in their rites. Taranto was a Greek colony long before the Romans came along.
Unfortunately, in the United States, this powerful dance is known as a silly wedding dance. In reality it is a wild, erotic trance dance of purification, performed mainly by women, to cure the mythical bite of the tarantula. The original name of the dance is pizzica tarantata. Pizzica literally means 'bite'-- a reference to the "bite of love" that occurs when one's subconscious mind is filled with repressed desires. This bite of love often begins during puberty and is caused by a repression of erotic desire or an experience of unrequited love, abuse or depression. A woman afflicted by this bite is called tarantata; she feels caught in a web, the web of societal repression.
In Greece, southern Italy, North Africa, and Spain, when this mythical "bite" or mental condition afflicted women, their only cure was to be found through music and dance. We can date the origins of the tarantella back to the ancient orgiastic Greek rites in honor of the God Dionysus. These rites were led by women who reached a state of euphoria, dancing to the rhythms of tambourines. Since ancient times, these rites have included powerful ritual music and trance dances that have been used across the Mediterranean for healing and purification.
--from the Tarantata CD booklet
In Muslim parts of Africa, women practice an age-old healing ritual for women only, called the zār, in which they play drums and dance to cure themselves of spirit possession. Again, it's practiced as a response to the repressive societal conditions women live under.
The entire music and dance of the tarantella is based on the beat of the tambourine. Alessandra teaches a traditional technique she learned from old Italian villagers, playing the main beats on the tambourine's drumhead, in between which she plays very rapid triplets with the jingles. It takes considerable skill and precision in the wrist action.
The frame drum was the characteristic instrument associated with ancient women, especially in their religious rites. The frame drum was the instrument associated with the Great Mother Cybele from pre-Greek times. Alessandra is currently performing with a group called the Daughters of Cybele.
As an Italian woman, I get very much out of Alessandra Belloni's music-- these rhythms of women's power are in my ancestral blood-- I feel connected to a lineage of powerful women going back to ancient Rome, ancient Greece, back to where all this came from originally: Anatolia. Italians and Sicilians have always traced their origins back to Anatolia, and the one consistent thread running through all these thousands of years of history and prehistory is women drumming and dancing in the rites of the Great Mother, traceable farther back than anything else, to the end of the Paleolithic in Anatolia. La Belloni brings back to me so powerfully my connectedness with my very long line of wise-women ancestors.
She has four CDs of her music out currently: the first was Earth, Sun, and Moon recorded with a folkloric group she founded, I Giullari di Piazza (which roughly translates as 'the town square players'). Then her solo career broke out with Tarantata: Dance of the Ancient Spider, followed by Tarantelli & Canti d'Amore. Her latest CD, Daughter of the Drum, is privately issued. I hope she gets a recording contract again. She is an amazing artist who deserves to be better appreciated. She performs her music with a certain raw intensity. It isn't for people who want their music to be all smooth and safe. Her music is wild, powerful, and very female.
There is more to the tarantella than the conventional story about how the dance was used to cure tarantula bites. Signora Belloni traces its origins back to pre-Christian pagan Greek and Roman women's mysteries. The bite of the spider is allegorical-- the real ailment the tarantella is a cure for, the tarantism, comes from the repression of women's freedom and sexuality in a patriarchal world. For ages women in southern Italy have been gathering and dancing themselves into a frenzy to let their female power out in a safe space for healing. The Greek mythology about the Maenads came from real women who drummed and danced ecstatically in their rites. Taranto was a Greek colony long before the Romans came along.
Unfortunately, in the United States, this powerful dance is known as a silly wedding dance. In reality it is a wild, erotic trance dance of purification, performed mainly by women, to cure the mythical bite of the tarantula. The original name of the dance is pizzica tarantata. Pizzica literally means 'bite'-- a reference to the "bite of love" that occurs when one's subconscious mind is filled with repressed desires. This bite of love often begins during puberty and is caused by a repression of erotic desire or an experience of unrequited love, abuse or depression. A woman afflicted by this bite is called tarantata; she feels caught in a web, the web of societal repression.
In Greece, southern Italy, North Africa, and Spain, when this mythical "bite" or mental condition afflicted women, their only cure was to be found through music and dance. We can date the origins of the tarantella back to the ancient orgiastic Greek rites in honor of the God Dionysus. These rites were led by women who reached a state of euphoria, dancing to the rhythms of tambourines. Since ancient times, these rites have included powerful ritual music and trance dances that have been used across the Mediterranean for healing and purification.
--from the Tarantata CD booklet
In Muslim parts of Africa, women practice an age-old healing ritual for women only, called the zār, in which they play drums and dance to cure themselves of spirit possession. Again, it's practiced as a response to the repressive societal conditions women live under.
The entire music and dance of the tarantella is based on the beat of the tambourine. Alessandra teaches a traditional technique she learned from old Italian villagers, playing the main beats on the tambourine's drumhead, in between which she plays very rapid triplets with the jingles. It takes considerable skill and precision in the wrist action.
The frame drum was the characteristic instrument associated with ancient women, especially in their religious rites. The frame drum was the instrument associated with the Great Mother Cybele from pre-Greek times. Alessandra is currently performing with a group called the Daughters of Cybele.
As an Italian woman, I get very much out of Alessandra Belloni's music-- these rhythms of women's power are in my ancestral blood-- I feel connected to a lineage of powerful women going back to ancient Rome, ancient Greece, back to where all this came from originally: Anatolia. Italians and Sicilians have always traced their origins back to Anatolia, and the one consistent thread running through all these thousands of years of history and prehistory is women drumming and dancing in the rites of the Great Mother, traceable farther back than anything else, to the end of the Paleolithic in Anatolia. La Belloni brings back to me so powerfully my connectedness with my very long line of wise-women ancestors.