tarantella

Tarantella is the diminutive form of Taranto — the ancient city of Tarentum in Apulia in southern Italy — and it names both a fast, whirling folk dance of the region and the spider (tarantula, also from Taranto) whose bite supposedly necessitated the dance. The belief was specific and was taken seriously for centuries: a person bitten by a tarantula spider would fall into a state of melancholy, torpor, convulsions, or uncontrolled movement called tarantism, and the only cure was to dance — to dance furiously, continuously, accompanied by specific music (itself called tarantella), until the venom sweated out through the skin. The afflicted person would dance for hours or days, stopping only when exhaustion or recovery forced a halt. Physicians, musicians, and priests all participated in the cure, which was practiced in Apulia from at least the fifteenth century through the nineteenth.

Tarantism was described by serious physicians and natural historians as a medical phenomenon and debated as such. Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1707), one of the leading physicians of his era, visited Apulia and reported on tarantism with clinical seriousness. The symptoms he observed — the compulsive movement, the altered emotional states, the apparent responsiveness to specific musical modes — were real phenomena, though the cause he attributed them to (spider venom) is now considered incorrect. Modern researchers have proposed various alternative explanations: mass psychogenic illness (collective hysteria responding to social stress), real spider bites with psychological amplification, ritual possession theater with medical framing, or some combination. The tarantella may have been a culturally licensed form of emotional release for populations under severe social constraint, particularly women, whose affliction with tarantism gave them permission to move, make noise, and behave in ways otherwise unavailable to them.

The tarantella as a dance form independent of its medical context is a vigorous, fast 6/8 or 12/8 meter folk dance of southern Italy, characterized by rapid turning, heel and toe work, and the use of tambourines. Couples dance it together, separating and reuniting, the tempo accelerating across the dance's duration in a way that recalls the therapeutic frenzy of the cure. Composers in the nineteenth century adopted the tarantella as a concert form and as a vehicle for virtuosic piano writing: Chopin wrote a tarantella, Liszt wrote a tarantella as part of his Années de pèlerinage — Venezia e Napoli, and Heller, Clementi, and Weber all contributed to what became a significant sub-genre of Romantic piano music. The folkloric whirl became a symbol of the passionate South, of Italy's vivid and dangerous energies, exploited by Northern European composers seeking color and vitality.

The tarantella occupies an unusual position in the history of dance because it is one of the few forms whose origin narrative is explicitly therapeutic — it exists, in the popular account, because people needed it to survive. Whether or not the medical theory was ever correct, the dance's energy communicates something of that urgency: the tarantella is not a courtly display or a social amenity but a physical argument, a negotiation between the body and some force it is trying to expel. Ibsen exploited this association in A Doll's House (1879), where Nora dances an increasingly frantic tarantella as a way of forestalling the catastrophic revelation of her forgery — the dance as the last available mechanism for controlling an uncontrollable situation, the body in motion delaying the moment when speech must happen.