One of the stated missions of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas is to introduce audiences to foreign performers who might otherwise have no reason to come to New Haven.
Then there are the shows which are just gifts to the ethnic cultural communities which have settled and thrived in New Haven for generations.
That’s the point we are at in this year’s festivals. Tuesday night’s raucous concert by folk-rockers Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino in the Yale University Theatre was a rallying spot for New Haven’s Italian-American community. Wednesday night’s presentation of the multi-styled choral music show The Words With Painted Sound by the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir will doubtless be supported by throngs of New Haven’s Polish community.
(A&I artists also form a community unto themselves. The director of the Wroclaw choir was in the audience at the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino show.)
Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino began with each member of the band walking onto the stage, adding to a big musical build-up with began with accordion and soon spread to drums, guitar and fiddle. Each musician was given a lengthy intro spoken into an offstage mic, in Italian. Much of the audience appreciated the native-language descriptions. Others just dug the loud, chugging music.
The playing was manly and muscular, with lots of thumping and hard strumming. Then the estrogen kicked in. A woman in a black shawl strolled out and began singing a lovely, strong melody. Then another woman, in a red shawl, raced out and started dancing deliriously.
Arts & Ideas really should have booked a show like this into Toad’s Place and not the staid proscenium stage of the University Theatre. The UT had been loosened up by its previous A&I tenant, the equally earthy and natural Handspring Puppet Company with its production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But CGS cried out for a stage that brought it closer to its audience, or at least a venue (New Haven Green?) where the crowd felt it could dance and chant along.
As it was, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino used its show to educate and enlighten. The music is rough and wild on purpose, reinvigorating ancient vocal and instrumental folk tradition of Salento, Italy, with some electrified innovations and contemporary pop energy. The instrumentation and furious playing style was reminiscent of Irish bands such as Black 47, especially when members of Cazoniere Grecanico Salentino started rocking on bagpipes and Bodhran drums. There’s also a sense of British folk-psychedelic act Steeleye Span, with the unbridled yet accomplished musicianship and shouted vocals.
Videos of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino playing live can be found on the band’s website.
“We believe this power can still be alive today,” exclaimed bandleader Mauro Durante. He gave a brief geography lesson: Salentois is at the “heel of the boot” which is Italy, so far out on the southeastern tip that it’s nearly in Africa. He further explained that the band is itself becoming a tradition; two of its members, including Durante, are the offspring of founders of the band. Durante told a rapt audience that the last show his father ever played with the group, in 2007, was here in New Haven.
This show was like watching a party, one with special appeal for the many Italians and Italian-Americans present seated in the hall.
Sometimes Arts & Ideas brings New Haven new ideas. Sometime it hones in on the arts and cultural traditions we’ve already fostered here, and gives them their due.
