Dancing Maenads: Insight at the heart of an exhibition

A small but clever show made explicit a link so fundamental - and so visible - that I'd never noticed it at all.

ancient rites, modern capers

Spend some time in Salento, and you'll end up soon enough at one of the local festivals that take place all over this region. Towns of every size hold them year-round, though mostly in the summer. There are big annual affairs, dedicated to the patron saints; then there are ad hoc money spinners of more recent vintage, dedicated to exploiting some ingredient of the Italian culinary fantasy.
Either way, there will be dancing; and this dance will be well embedded in local festival culture.



The morning after, by contrast...
Might you feel obliged to do gentle penance in the soft silenzio of a local museum? There to encounter... the kind of Grecian Urn that weighed down your school visits some time back last century. If, like me, you fell for the schoolboyish error of separating "ancient" and "popular" culture into mental boxes, you might have failed to notice the similarities between your nighttime revels and the next day's remedy. You might, like me, appreciate this exhibition. Because, in a few bold images, it glues the millenia together.

The same musical instruments drive the same gestures

And so, the whole high-vs-low dichotomy simply dissolves in the face of one simple pairing:

painting(ancient) + photography(contemporary)

At the Castromediano museum in Lecce, the photos of the Bevilacqua family's father-and-son business are projected onto a big screen. They literally reflect in the glass cases full of ancient pottery.

projections of the imagination

This juxtaposition of images makes plain how rituals - drunken rituals - have been shaking tambourines at the dancing female form for the last 2½ millennia. The male gaze of the past fell upon and recorded scenes which emerge straight back out of any local sagra today.

In the painful light of day, with echoes of last night's music throbbing behind the eyes, we can go to this exhibition and read about "rhythmic music and animated dances, evidently particularly heartfelt and practised by the Apulian people". But is it a comment on yesterday's revel? No - it's how the exhibition blurb describes one painted ancient vase ("musiche ritmate e danze movimentate, evidentemente particolarmente sentiti e praticati tra le genti apule.")

I shan't go into details where the pottery is concerned. The glass cases of the Museo Castromediano (which provided most of the selected highlights in this show) are many, and you can do your own research there. I find their contents blur in front of my amateur gaze. They're repetitious, all those old pots - but that's somewhat the point - because so too are the festivals. Just like the dancing, the infectious predictable tambourines, the rented mobile lighting and all the associated business of formulaic food and booze stalls (wine at 50 cents a placcy cup, rosso/rosato/bianco)... The whole drunken party, the festa, is recurrent.

Could we have stumbled here into the centro storico of the Salentine imagination?

Perhaps.

A bit of background

La sagra

What hides beneath this name, the sagra?
A party?
A rite?
A festival?

Well, parties and festivals - tellingly - both get called festa in Italian, both the same word. But a sagra is more than that, with its ritual aspect. And so it's one of my growing list of things here which are better experienced than translated. The Italian name is clearly linked to the sacred, through the Latin sacrare. And so it's often a commemoration of when a church or papier-mâché saint got consecrated:

Unsurprisingly, the relationship between religion and the lascivious pizzica danced at these events hasn't always been easy. The painted pottery in the Castromediano collection shows a lot of religious symbolism, often connecting the scenes to Bacchus. But here's one thing that has changed over the millenia. The relationship between boozy dancing and the Catholic church has been variously ambivalent or overtly antagonistic.

Il tamburello

This drum/tambourine is so important, I've seen groups of peole here dance with no melodic instruments or singers at all. Just a line of four or five players, bashing out a driving rythm, is enough for a group of friends to dance a spontaneous back yard pizzica. Sometimes, only one drum is enough to accompany a confident singer.

If you feeling inspired, there'll often be a stall of locally-made instruments for sale at a sagra.

The ancient tamburelli you see painted on Greek pots often had ribbons with bells attached to them. I can't imagine the physical sound would've been very different - but what it all meant to the listener? Perhaps Bacchus might help answer that one...

Exhibition details

• English language website is at Menadi Danzanti
• It's split across two sites, the Museo Castromediano (Lecce) and the Palazzo Marchesale (Melpignano)
• Contemporary photography by the Bevilacqua father and son team
• Continues until 26th September 2018; however the pottery is mostly visible year-round at Museo Castromediano, Lecce
• Free entry

Conflicts of interest

A personal contact was involved in the graphic design for the exhibition.