Save The Date - Sunday, Aug 19, 2007 - 3:00PM

"Tarantella, Tarantula," a uniquely vital and contemporary exploration of dance, music, and story telling. Under the direction of Slobodan Dan Paich whose multi-disciplinary, idiosyncratic style has been described by critics in Europe as being at the nexus of dance, theater, cinema and "zen." Artship Dance/Theatre's production exudes a life force that expresses a continuity from modern needs to passionate, age-old practices.

The performance flows through nonlinear dance scenarios and music sequences, weaving a delicate and poignant story of immigration and assimilation, rich with ancient Mediterranean folklore ---- a confluence, like watersheds, of cultural elements from Africa, Europe, and Asia that persist to this day, brought to California and across America by immigrants from southern Italy.

"This performance is not about a spider. It is about the age-old yearning to cure 'The Dark Night of the Soul'," state the program notes of the production. “Here we work with dance and music. It is about our need, in spite of all modern social dysfunctions, to help each other and to continue the search to recover closeness."

For Artship’s 2006 performance series, the company weaves verbal and non-verbal narratives in which the ensemble’s actor/dancers perform more than one role, and elements of their actual ancestors and collective ancestral memories emerge in portrayals of the main characters. Giovannina Pascali, the protagonist female character, comes to America after World War I, the youngest child of the family that lost all its men in the War. The male lead character is Gaetano Carduni, a young American-born doctor whose family arrived in California a generation earlier, just after the Gold Rush of the 1890’s. She is steeped in ancestral memory and "old-country" practices; he is enamored with science and modern advancements in medicine. Each character experiences a collision with the aspirations for assimilation in a new culture. Their lives entwine with the practice of the Tarantella dance.

The Tarantella has been employed for centuries by village elders, primarily women, in Italy and elsewhere. The dance's outward purpose is to ward off the negative effects of the poisonous bite of the tarantula spider, but its more general inward purpose is to offer tools to deal with oppression, unrequited love, and longings of the heart that do not have outlets in traditional societies. The performance is not a reconstruction of any particular regional type of Tarantella dance or music, but an immersion in the essence of Tarantella as a poetic framework for the production’s narrative.

"Tarantella, Tarantula" portrays the issues that also face contemporary immigrants from Africa, East and South Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, as they try to create a new life here in California and other parts of America, living in two or more cultures at the same time. Their yearnings have as many shapes as there are human beings.

Artship Dance/Theater offers you the opportunity to enjoy a diverse, international and inter-generational group of actors, dancers, musicians and visual artists, who are working together, with a great amount of mutual support and respect. Our aim is to create unique, vital and contemporary explorations of cultural assimilation through deceptively simple movement, accompanied by live, tradition-based, original music and spoken word. In this process, our company may be re-interpreting the genre of physical story telling theater.

Artship programs have been recognized locally and internationally for reclaiming public spaces with performances and art exhibitions that create a meaningful resonance between audience and art in each setting. This work has spanned settings as diverse as boarded-up storefronts, historic landmarks, urban parks, an Art Deco Era steamship, the historic Truman House in Germany, medieval towers in Italy and Spain, and an Ottoman fortress in Serbia.
We invite you to arrive early to view the interpretative and visual art exhibit related to Artship's multi-year research into the origins and folklore of Tarantella dances.