Ritual, power, dementia
There is no known possession ritual on this planet that does not have something to do with oppression. If Tarentism is the only one of these that does not claim to be one, it resembles them in many ways. In Tarentism, one does not speak of “possessed” people but rather of “bitten” people, for whom the operative modalities of the cure by (the “right”) music and (the “right”) dance are similar, or nevertheless comparable, to Haitian Voodoo.
Not everyone gets bitten, or rather, certain profiles have a greater propensity for being bitten. The majority of those who are bitten are women from poor families. Logic would suggest that this is not a coincidence, but rather a reminder that it is “those people” who mostly work in the fields where tarantulas are more likely to be encountered. This logic, which would have these women and men so consumed by indolence following a bite that they are overcome by madness, is countered by the systemic logic common to other possession rituals. The latter states that a person who is subject to depression because of their position at the bottom of the social ladder has an incentive to “get bitten” so that they can, on the one hand, give themselves over to the outlet that is madness (of which they are deprived the rest of the time) and, on the other hand, gain exceptional agency over their social condition by taking on the status of a “tarantulist”, which is as much feared as it is respected, and this according to precise cultural codes of “decompensation”. These are cultural codes linked to processes of mimesis which, according to Foucauldian theories, remain blind spots in institutional psychology.
These different ways of reading the same situation lead to many other ambiguities. The at-home treatment of the sufferer is carried out by accompanying the patient in their dance with the music and colour that has been defined as suitable by the tarantula that has bitten them. This accompaniment is often done in presence of a large audience. It can be seen as a collective and supportive way, still governed by the same codes, of caring for a sick person by accompanying them rather than constraining them. Who would prefer to be interned in a psychiatric clinic?
However, one can see much more perverse mechanisms at play, in which everything is set up so that nothing changes – a way of granting partial freedom in order to better control fundamental freedoms. Not to mention the audience members who willingly indulge in voyeurism as they witness scenes of partially naked women crawling on the floor, exhausted from their dancing.
The tarantella presents itself as an alternative cure, based on trance and popular music practice in southern Italy. While it may seem preferable to psychiatric treatment, it is nonetheless embedded in the logic of power – and above all, all of its political dimensions are, in one way or another, mediated by music and sound. The tarantella and its stakes form the ideological and practical skeleton of Le Recueil des miracles; a skeleton to be questioned, twisted and even broken.
The history of the tarantella and the way in which it allows us to articulate thoughts on the political, ritual and social role of music are the starting point of Le Recueil des miracles. The initial formal idea is as follows: to articulate and re-articulate, in the space and duration of the performance, repeated musical-sound, choreographic or vocal-textual elements.
No ritual, as we have said, can claim to be free from the logics of power and the oppressive dynamics of the society that gave birth to it. Rituals reflect, act upon and reconfigure the power that runs through them. Le Recueil des miracles, bubbling with the tensions between the natural, the cultural and the popular will seek the deflagration, the destruction of conflation.
There is no ritual, even on stage, without catharsis: the show examines good and evil, the complex relationship between violence and passivity, what is liberated and what is kept locked up, what we want to keep and what we want to eliminate. What can be separated, by thought or by music? Which elements are destined to remain conjoined?
