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TRAD DANCES SCHOOL

"Dance is the mother of the arts.
Music and poetry are determined over time,
figurative arts and architecture in space:
the dance lives equally in time and space.
In it creator and creation, work and artist, they all do one"
Curt Sachs, History of Dance
Get closer to the pleasure and joy of dance, through passages and rhythms full of life and different stories, colors and cultures. While dancing, we travel through the geography of countries and the history of societies, we travel to seek the roots of rhythm and relationship in the physical body and in movement, exercising the capacity to listen to oneself, of the other and of the group through the passage, the voice and ear, developing the proprioceptive abilities; rediscovering the potential of physical-emotional communication of dances and sounds of traditions that culturally sanctify the community as a place of sharing.
Get ready for a tiptoe journey from South Italy to France, from Spain to Greece, in Ireland and Eastern Europe ...
The trad dances courses of Arci Tavola Tonda are conducted by Barbara Crescimanno

TRAD MUSIC SCHOOL

According to UNESCO in Paris in 1989,
by contacting the Governments of the member countries:
"Traditional and popular culture is part of the universal heritage of humanity,
[it] is a powerful means of rapprochement
between different peoples and social groups 
and affirming their cultural identity»
Music is one of the privileged forms within the human communication process. It embodies symbols, concepts and objects produced by a culture in a space and time, and can be taken as a paradigm through which to read a culture.
What do we mean by 'popular'? On the one hand, the possibility of accessing the services offered to those who cannot afford the expensive costs of normal music schools; on the other, the focus on the tools and rhythms of the Sicilian and Mediterranean popular tradition.

The courses of the School of Popular Music are: Frame DrumsFluteDiatonic AccordionAccordionViolinMandolinVocal TechniqueChorusGuitarOud (Arabic lute), Ney Flute

TRAD DANCES SCHOOL

"Dance is the mother of the arts.
Music and poetry are determined over time,
figurative arts and architecture in space:
the dance lives equally in time and space.
In it creator and creation, work and artist, they all do one"
Curt Sachs, Storia della danza

TRAD MUSIC SCHOOL

According to UNESCO in Paris in 1989,
by contacting the Governments of the member countries:
"Traditional and popular culture is part of the universal heritage of humanity,
[it] is a powerful means of rapprochement
between different peoples and social groups
and affirming their cultural identity»
Get closer to the pleasure and joy of dance, through passages and rhythms full of life and different stories, colors and cultures. While dancing, we travel through the geography of countries and the history of societies, we travel to seek the roots of rhythm and relationship in the physical body and in movement, exercising the capacity to listen to oneself, of the other and of the group through the passage, the voice and ear, developing the proprioceptive abilities; rediscovering the potential of physical-emotional communication of dances and sounds of traditions that culturally sanctify the community as a place of sharing.
Get ready for a tiptoe journey from South Italy to France, from Spain to Greece, in Ireland and Eastern Europe ...
The trad dances courses of Arci Tavola Tonda are conducted by Barbara Crescimanno
Music is one of the privileged forms within the human communication process. It embodies symbols, concepts and objects produced by a culture in a space and time, and can be taken as a paradigm through which to read a culture.
What do we mean by 'popular'? On the one hand, the possibility of accessing the services offered to those who cannot afford the expensive costs of normal music schools; on the other, the focus on the tools and rhythms of the Sicilian and Mediterranean popular tradition.

The courses of the School of Popular Music are: Frame Drums, Flute, Diatonic Accordion, Accordion, Violin, Mandolin, Vocal Technique, Chorus, Guitar, Oud (Arabic lute), Ney Flute

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CHORÓS. Dances, Voices e Rhythms from Southern Italy

Investigating the origins of traditional and ritual music and dance in Sicily, we came across a deeply feminine culture: The Nymphs.

The Nymphs are a historical-mythological figure common to the whole Mediterranean area from the Palaeolithic and surviving - transforming themselves - up to the modern age: semi-divine beings or wise women, who lived on the edge of the settlements and maintained the connection between the wild and the civilized. Among their many competences, they were MIDWIVES who ritually guided women in the phases of their life and in the important moments of transition (menarche, pregnancy, childbirth, etc.); HERBALISTS and BEEKEEPERS, connoisseurs of herbs and medicinal and psychotropic substances; practitioners of SINGING, DANCE and PERCUSSION (they are the oldest musicians and percussionists of which there is documentation on the island); PRIESTESSES who guide the community in the important passages of the life of individuals, who heal through non-ordinary states of consciousness ('nympholepsy'), using the chemistry of psychoactive plants, dance, rhythm, voice, breath.

In the passage from age to age, the Nymphs have been transformed, surviving in the cultural traditions of anthropological interest that are still alive. The female ritual tradition of the frame drum, for example, persisted in Sicily until the last century. The Nymphs today are 'Donni di fora' ('Ladies from outside'), 'magare' ('witches'), protagonists of folktales or in some cases Christian saints or Madonnas.

Moreover...

...at the origins of the Western theatrical tradition lies the Greek choir, a ‘collective figure’ that in honor of Dionysus, god of ritual intoxication, moves, dances, sings in unison.
The tragedy chorus of the classical period was made up of only men, yet it was born on the archetype of the choruses of Nymphs and Muses, from which also the initiatory choirs of adolescents and young women and men of the Greek archaic world derive. Next to the Greek theaters of Syracuse and Taormina we find sanctuaries dedicated to the Nymphs, with offers from actors, choreuts and the public who went to attend the sacred performances. Before men appropriated themselves exclusively to the ritual place in which the stories of the community were told, women were the original percussionists, dancers, singers, storytellers.
Dance, percussion, voice and relationship are still today inextricably linked in the dance world of southern Italy (ancient Magna Graecia) and Sicily. In an unbroken line documented at least from the sixth century BC the same women who played the drums were pragmatic herbalists, obstetricians and medicine women with a strong spirituality - pagan and then Christian - which intertwined the efficacy of herbs with the psychological-emotional one of prayers and songs, to the physical-perceptive one of music and dance.
So it was also in Sicily: the most ancient archaeological attestations concerning dance and music are linked to the ritual world of the goddesses, their priestesses and offerers. And, until the last century, in Sicily the frame drum was a purely female ritual instrument.

If you want study performing arts, theater, singing, percussion, dance, it’s to these roots that you must look, to a world in which what is now separated in different disciplines was born intertwined together.

We propose a two years training course, divided into two weekly lessons which include teaching:

- on the rhythmic movement related to the choreutics of Southern Italy and on breathing and vocal techniques, with introductory elements to the pedagogy of the group and of the movement;

- on the techniques on the frame drum.

The choreutic and percussive path will develop in parallel: the same repertoire will be addressed simultaneously from the point of view of the rhythm of the steps and the technique on the drum.

The weekly appointments will be accompanied by intensive monthly in-depth meetings on the historical and anthropological aspects of the Tarantella world, and on the practice of the Greek choir: dance, voice and percussion, both 'technical' and theoretical.

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TRAD ORCHESTRA

The Arci Tavola Tonda Orchestra was born in 2010 - with teachers and students of the School of Popular Music - and since 2017 has been repeatedly directed by Ambrogio Sparagna.

In reduced formation it conducts lively dance parties and plays steadily for the celebrations of April 25 in Palermo.
The Small Tavola Tonda Orchestra, coordinated by Michele Piccione, was invited to participate in some of the most important European traditional dance festivals, including the Gran Bal Trad of Vialfrè (TO), Andanças and Tradidanças in Portugal.

TRAD LUTHERIE LAB

Guitars, violins, plectrum instruments, we don't miss anything in our laboratory.

The violin making laboratory is the result of a project that has formed ten artisans and craftsmen capable of repairing, restoring and building acoustic instruments, with particular attention to traditional instruments, in a context in which this art is rapidly being lost. Two of the students of the original group at the end of the training became the managers of the Popular Violin Making of Arci Tavola Tonda
Come and visit us at the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa!

RECORDING STUDIO

The Recording Studio of Arci Tavola Tonda is dedicated to the great Palermo musician Giuseppe Leopizzi.

A recording room of about 20 square meters and a slightly smaller direction room, which also overlooks the large stage of the concert hall to record larger ensembles, along with all the other comforts - from the cafeteria to the sofas, from the lutherie to the reharsal rooms - allow you to concentrate fully on the creative process and make the recording experience a real pleasure.
Trying to say it, to believe it...

WHERE WE ARE

Arci Tavola Tonda is located in Palermo at the Padiglione 18A of the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa - an area of 55.000 mq of industrial archeology warehouses which can be accessed from Via P. Gili n. 4.

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