Subject: [JFRR] Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the
Mediterranean (ed. by Del Giudice, Luisa and Nancy Van Deusen)

Performing Ecstasies: Music, Dance, and Ritual in the Mediterranean.
Edited by Luisa Del Giudice and Nancy Van Deusen. 2005. Ottawa:
Institute for Medieval Music. 

Reviewed by Maria Hnaraki, Drexel University ([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 1053 words]

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.

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