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TATARATELLA, TARANTULA

 

A Production of Artship Dance/Theater

2006 Home Season

 

 

Slobodan Dan Paich….………….…………..Director, Dance Maker

 

ARTSHIP ACTORS, DANCERS & SINGERS

 

Catrina Kaupat……………...Giovannina Pascalis, recent immigrant

also portraying Giovannina’s ancestors, spirit of Tarantella

                                             

Tom Franco…………………….……Gaetano Carduni, young doctor

also portraying Giovannina’s ancestors, Spirit of Tarantella,

     Gaetano’s father and brother

 

Mardi Van Winkle…………..Signora Pascalis, Giovannina’s mother

also portraying Giovannina’s ancestors, spirit of Tarantella

 

AnaDiane Landelle…………Signora Galo, Govannina’s oldest sister

 also portraying Govannina’s ancestors, Spirit of Tarantella

 

Craig Coss………………...Anthropologist, Giovannina’s descendant

 

ARTSHIP MUSIC ENSEMBLE

 

Suellen Primost………………………………..Music Director, Cello

 

John Kadyk………………..Clarinet, Steel Drum, and Bamboo Flute

 

Marie Perrey……………………………………………....Accordion

                

 

Eric Andler…………………………………………..Lighting Design

 

Costumes and sets designed by Slobodan Dan Paich and co-created with Tom Franco (scenery/sculpture), Nathaniel Bolton (cloth sculp-ture), Robert du Domaine (cutouts), Kalim Quevedo (dress-making, tailoring), and Liz Diaz of North Beach Marin Canvas (large fabric constructions)

 

Story by S. D. Paich—written for this performance with Craig Coss

 

Jason Sheen…………………………………………...Stage Manager

Matt Haber………..………………...…………….…… Photography 

Sabine Grand………...…………...……………Announcement design

 

 


 TARANTELLA BACKGROUND

     
 
  The Tarantella is a folk dance that originated in Apulia (Pugila in Italian), a region of Southern Italy, where, by tradition and practice, it is believed that the dance cures the poisonous bite of the tarantula spider.

 

Actors dancers perform more than one role as the main characters emerge out of portrayals of fragments of their actual ancestors and collective ancestral memories		  

 

  
 
     
  Tarantella, Tarantula is not a reconstruction of any particular regional type of Tarantella dance or music, but an emersion into the essence of Tarantella as a poetic framework for the show’s story. The performance flows through nonlinear dance scenarios and musical sequences, weaving verbal and nonverbal narratives. ORIGINS OF THE PRODUCTION: THE FANO ARTS SCHOOL From 1975 to 1980, Slobodan Dan Paich founded and directed the Fano Arts School, an international summer school in the Apulia region of Italy, the land of Tarantella. To deepen a contemporary practice of performance and visual arts at the Fano Arts school, the school instructors collected natural materials and made ancient methods accessible to students. S. D. Paich has been fascinated by the rich traditions and expressions of Pugliese folklore ever since. Since 2001, Paich has been deeply reconnecting to his earlier experiences in Puglia His research into the multiple strands of Tarantella dance forms and music comprise the basis of this production. Salvatore Rizzo, a local craftsman and community leader who adopted and mentored the Fano Arts school’s participants, taught many, many things: how to make baskets, harvest and cook wild chicory, and grow, harvest, and cook other foods. He also told myriad stores about local places, peoples, beliefs, and the significance of certain names, saint’s days, and festivals. Salvatore’s simple and continuous use of the body as a source of proportion inspired the school as powerfully as the measures of the ancient buildings the participants lived in, the songs they heard, and the traditional dances they witnessed. In this production of Tarantella, Tarantula, the company explores the movement inherent in, and the visual art of, these ancient measuring systems—inspired by the way Salvatore Rizzo would use his body proportions to craft the dimensions of household objects and tools.

 

 

The performance is also based on S.D. Paich's lifelong interdisciplinary research into dance, music, folklore, and other ancient and parallel traditions. He has researched historical means of transcending gender roles in traditional societies and has collected and assembled examples of ancient lore which relate to modern needs. This research was also a basis for Paich’s major presented paper, Magna Graetia: Tarantella, which he was invited to give in November 2005 at the University of Thrace’s international conference on the meaning of traditional festivals held in northeastern Greece.

BRIEF ARTIST BIOS

  SLOBODAN DAN PAICH, dance maker and theater director, is cofounder and artistic director of Artship Dance/Theater (previously Augustino Dance Theater), where he has choreographed and directed with Augusto Ferriols since 1988. Before emigrating to England from his native Yugoslavia in 1967, Mr. Paich acted in radio, television and film from an early age in Belgrade where he started a number of experimental theater groups based on movement and dance, also coaching dancers to act and actors to dance. Since emigrating to the Bay Area in 1985, Mr. Paich has been involved in extending performing and visual arts into the community.  He became Executive and Artistic Director of Artship Foundation when it was incorporated in 1992. He also served as director of arts and culture on the board of directors of the International Peace Foundation, Berlin & Vienna, where he commuted from the Bay Area from 1996 to 2002. At TanzFabrik (Dance Factory), in Berlin, he taught acting for dancers and performance for visual artists. He has received many community, state and national awards for art, performance, and community work.

 

CATRINA KAUPAT joined Artship Dance/Theater in 2002 as a core ensemble member and has performed in all of its productions since then. Catrina co-created and choreographed many theater elements including the narrative for the lead character in Artship Dance/Theater’s 2004 San Francisco production of Same River Twice at the ODC Theater. Having graduated from the Laban-based Lola-Rogge Dance School in Hamburg, Germany, Catrina has performed and taught dance in both Europe and the U.S.

 

TOM FRANCO joined the company in 2004 as a core ensemble member. In addition to dance, he has grounding in yoga, Tai Chi, clowning, and singing. He graduated from the California College of Art and is skilled in both sculpture and metalwork. Tom is the principal collaborator in the creation of Artship Dance/Theater’s idiosyncratic indoor-outdoor performance installations such as the shadow structure for audience participation and the “egg shapes” made of split bamboo.  

MARDI VAN WINKLE, an Artship core ensemble member since 2001, began to study dance at the age of five in the Children’s West Coast Program of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine. She has been a lead dancer with the San Francisco Modern Dance Company, and she also choreographed and directed her own company, Open Arts, that presented environmental improv dance in San Francisco, performing in both traditional and unusual venues (such as parking lots, parks, streets, buses, and bridges). She has also taught dance to children.

 

ANADIANE LANDELLE, an Artship core ensemble member, was born in France in 1962. She studied with an American Indian teacher in British Columbia, where she was trained as a singer to participate in the sacred healing ceremonies of Si Si Weiss Medicine. In 2005, Ana Diane joined Artship Dance/Theater. She contributed to this production by helping to develop body-relevant and sensitive skill sets required to perform the Tarantella style movements and voice production.

 

CRAIG COSS graduated from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and has studied at the University of Washington and UC Davis. He has been involved in theater since he was nine years old, with a lifelong interest in the art of storytelling. Since then, he has worked to make myths and stories accessible to a wide range of people. For that reason, since 1994, he has told stories for schools, camps, parties, librarian conferences, and museums in Seattle and the North Bay Area. He is a Joseph Campbell Foundation Associate, and regularly contributes writings for the foundation’s website. He has joined the Artship Dance/Theater company for this production.

 

ARTSHIP ENSEMBLE

 

SUELLEN PRIMOST, CELLO. Suellen began her cello studies at age ten and has spent a lifetime articulating musically what words alone cannot express. Throughout her career, she has explored diverse musical styles, ranging from early music to classical, ethnic to improvisatory. Suellen constantly pursues creative, authentic, dynamic, and innovative collaborations with dancers, actors, poets, and fellow musicians. She has performed with the Celestia Consort, Walkabout, and Duetto Lyrico; The Celebration, Alban, Mendelssohn and Mori Achen Trios; The Elysian Quartet and Espiritu Ensembles; and the Nashville, Taos and Roanoke Symphony Orchestras. Suellen co-founded and played in Sedona’s First Jazz on the Rocks Festival. She composed the musical score and performed for the Herstories Project’s theatre production of Bone Songs: Echoes of the Unknown Mother. Suellen was a guest performer with the Living Arts Playback Theater Ensemble of Berkeley and performs regularly on recording sessions with various Bay Area artists as well as with the Artship Dance/Theater, where she has served as its Music Director since 2002.   JOHN KADYK, CLARINET & STEEL DRUM. John has been fascinated by music of all kinds since childhood. First inspired by his mother’s playing, he started piano at age six, violin at nine, clarinet at ten, and gradually added instruments until now there is little room for anything else in his apartment. In addition to Artship Dance/Theater, he currently performs with the Living Arts Playback Theatre Ensemble and various other musical ensembles. John studied music at Oberlin College and has made musical pilgrimages to Trinidad, Cuba, and Ireland.

 

MARIE PERREY, ACCORDION. Marie joined Artship Dance/theater in 2004. Born in France, where her study of flute began at age ten, Marie taught music to children in Paris for several years. She has sung alto in a Baroque chorus and played bass guitar for nine years in the rock band Open in Paris.

 

LIGHTING DESIGN

 

ERIC ANDLER, LIGHTING DESIGNER, is the Technical Director at ODC Theater since February where he designed lights for the Scuba and Migrations programs. Additionally in the Bay Area, he has worked with Dance Mission Theater, Magic Theater, the West Wave Dance Festival, and East Bay Arts High School. Eric received his degree in acting from Illinois State University, and has performed in Chicago and the fringe festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.

ARTSHIP DANCE/THEATER • ELEMENTS OF OUR WORK

Artship Dance/Theater always works with the germ of an idea as a point for gathering diverse artists and disciplines to create performances for specific sites or theater.

Dance. Movement is our primary response to embodying and expressing ideas. Whatever we do in the theater, we always start by exploring movement. Although we use words and narrative, expression through dance—not literature—is the primary motivation in our theater. Artship Dance/Theater is a small gesture, physical storytelling theater company that generates its expression through dance movement first, however small.  

The company works with mature dancers who are creating, rediscovering, and relearning movement vocabulary appropriate to their bodies, and in that way they are continuing and expanding their poetic range. The company also works with emerging dancers whose expressions and explorations have not yet been set in any particular movement language. From its origins in East European experimental theater, the company encourages actors to dance and dancers to act.

 

Theater and Visual Arts. We often work in site-specific environments, like the stables of an historic house or the cargo holds of a ship, and we painstakingly tune them for the performance. But when we use a stage, we “tune” the space rather than decorate it. It is a meaningfully enriched environment, appearing transformative or empty, but not neutral. Our artists carefully craft our costumes and props, and we often exhibit them for years after performances as pieces of art or sculpture.

 

Often, several of our principal performing artists are also accomplished practicing visual artists, in such media as sculpture, tectonic, painterly, and conceptual but non-verbal elements, all of which contribute to the general staging of our dance/theater work.  

Cinema. We often use photographed sequences, but even when we do not, there are elements of performance staged more like film than theater, and sometimes they are intended as strong counterpoints to the stylization of dance and ritual.  

Music. Music is the lifeblood and the oxygen of our performances. The company includes a small ensemble of accomplished and dedicated musicians who improvise and create new material continuously; they bring to life in music the ethno-musicological research the company is always engaged in.  

Spoken Word. Once thematic focus is chosen, the contextual parameters set, and the structural and dramatic outcomes sketched, the narration and the story grow organically out of all the processes involved. Imaginative Function. We see the inner world of voluntary and involuntary imaginative function as central to our dance/theater making. We are fascinated by the human ability to nurture ourselves through sublimation and dreaming, and our capacities of resilience, survival, and adaptability. We see the imaginative process as central to these functions and art as necessary food for it. We believe strongly that we speak to ourselves in dreams through dynamic images as a means of self-healing and self-knowledge.  

Zen. Although we are not practitioners of Zen per se, company members may or may not practice different forms of meditation or prayer. Our visual metaphors and poetic paradoxes, as well as particular relationships to empty spaces, are tuned, idiosyncratic measured timing that has been associated with elements of abstraction, ambiguity, and complexity—perhaps similar to the Zen aesthetic—as a counterpoint to other elements of the performance.

 

SPECIAL THANKS

 

SUPPORT FOR THIS PRODUCTION           

Tarantella, Tarantula is funded in part by a Donor-Advised Fund—Tides Foundation, Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, and by the generous contributions and in-kind support of individual donors.

 

ARTSHIP BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Dr. George Leitmann, Chair; Frank J. Giunta, President and Acting Treasurer; TheArthur Wright, Secretary; Nina Manzo, Dr. Paul Pangaro, Dr. Jasmina Vujic, and Katie Wolf.

 

INDIVIDUALS

Lottie Rose, Barbara and Tom Sargent, Dennis Letbetter, Robert du Domaine, Liz Diaz, Rob Bailis and Vera Ilijin. 		 
     
 
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