Tanz und WahnSinn / Dance and ChoreoMania

 

table of contents

Abstracts and additional visual and audiovisual material on this website:

IV. Performance and Choreomania


Fabrizio Manco
Bodied Experiences of Madness: ATarantato's Perception

[english]

Fabrizio Manco


Bodied Experiences of Madness: a Tarantato’s Perception

Based on an earlier writing of 1999 on tarantism and Ankoku Butoh, this article calls for a personal and transpersonal re-embodiment of the culture of Salentine tarantism, for a re-thinking in its manifold aspects of somatic rebellion, historical, social, economic, performative and theatrical aspects and for a rethinking about trance and the so-called “out of body experience” still steeped in a dualistic understanding, in order to challenge dichotomies. This written reflection comes from personal experiences and cultural heritage of that subaltern culture of Salento and its very specific form of tarantism. Together with those reliquary aerial traces, I weave my writing from my artistic practice and research, hoping to provide a sensitive response to what was a syncretic culture of ritual and suffering, with its multifaceted phenomenology, animistic substrate and dis-sonant parts. Divided into five sections and a short “conclusion,” this article unfolds from personal storytelling to historical contextualization and a more speculative approach based on the two terms I coined: the ear body and site-contingent, as enquiries into embodied location, where the body is an active listening organism and site, with somatic-auditory attuning and auditory discrimination. From an ontologic approach I could then envision the body of the tarantati becoming an anthropomorphic sensory hair cell. The article concludes with a trans-cultural, historical and experiential dialogue between the body in crisis of tarantism and that of Ankoku Butoh.

 

 

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Herausgeberin und Herausgeber / editors
Zu den Autorinnen und Autoren /authors
Bildnachweis / list of illustrations

 

(c) 2011 Johannes Birringer & Josephine Fenger, editors

Leipzig: Henschel Verlag, 2011.paperback,€ 24.90, ISBN-10: 3894877103

This book project is supported by

Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung (GTF)

For the publisher's announcement, click here