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“You Have To Dance!”
by Melissa Bailey | Jun 14, 2006 12:34 pm
(1) Comment | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Arts
These woman brought the stirring sounds of Southern Italy to the Festival of Arts & Ideas Tuesday. They charmed the crowd, jammed with special U.S. guests, and got hugs from dozens of strangers with distant Italian roots.
Le Assurd, a four-woman troupe with powerful voices, castanets and deep tambourines, sings traditional folk music from the streets of Naples, the Sicilian countryside, and the hard-knock workers’ life from all over Southern Italy. They filled Yale’s Branford College Courtyard with chants, love songs and enchanting lullabyes, with harmonies made rich by Cristina Vetrone’s remarkable, deep voice.
Vetrone (pictured), who plays the accordian-like concertina, interspersed songs with a hilarious, charming stage act. In broken English filled in by her joking stage-mates, Vetrone shared the stories behind the belted-out songs and dance.
One song told of how Southern Italian women subverted Garibaldi’s troops when they came to conquer Sicily and unify Italy. Women killed them by seduction, Vetrona explained, because “In Italy, men, one minute — no, one second! — after love, sleep.”
One celebrated the spontaneity of love: “The things that happen improvisally are the most beautiful, the best love story.”
Another song was for women from Puglia who have “many children, many work,” or others with similar hardship: If you’re being cheated on, if you have a little stress because your son isn’t doing well in school ... “You have to dance!”
In a playfully blaspheming “song for Madonna” involving an erotic dance, one woman casts off a scarf “because men, you know, scielgono, chooss, the women for the ... the blouse, the teets!”
The group’s serious talent went far beyond their whimsical front — especially when one of the four, Enza Prestia, broke out in a mean drum solo, transforming a simple tambourine into the sounds of a full drum set.
Where do they find the music? They travel to small-town festivals, explained Vetrona after the show. “We go, we hear, and we take what we like.” In many pieces, they set folk words to their own music. Their female stage personas are so strong because they come from a worker’s or peasants’ tradition, “because life is hard in Southern Italy.”
After the show, Vetrona, Prestia and the other singers (Enza Pagliara and Lorella Monti, pictured at top, left to right) received hug after hug from New Haven area Italian-Americans. “Piece of my homeland, give me a hug!” called out one expat from Lucca, Tuscany, in Italian. This kiss is for my family in Naples! said another. Some, with two phrases in Italian and distant relatives in Sicily or Leche, wanted to know: “Have you heard of my family?”
The group also played with other performers they’d met jamming at the bar at the Colony Inn the previous evening. With Maurice Turner from Uprooted: The Katrina Project on trumpet, William O’Neal from Junebug Productions (both pictured) on vocals, and local jazz drummer Richard Tortorigi, they threw together a rousing improvisation, complete with fervent audience claps, just the kind of collaboration the Festival’s all about.
