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.