From her punk-rock adolescence in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, Maria Mazzotta has certainly kept a few traces, the energy and anger carried by her hoarse and torn voice, blue and purplish locks in her Mediterranean jet. It seemed less obvious for his musical career, dedicated, for two decades, to perpetuate and renovate the tradition of the pizzica, a regional variety of the Tarantelle.
So, associated with tarantism, a therapeutic and cathartic rite aimed at curing bites of a spider – supposedly the tarantula – by dance and on a frantic rhythm (in measure 6/8). This practice and beast have the same etymology as the apulian city of Taranto, where the phenomenon would have been observed first. Before it turns into a bastion of steel and became the most polluted city in Europe, with a catastrophic sanitary assessment.
Pizzica rebirth
Originally from Lecce, in the Salento Peninsula, Maria Mazzotta was linked from 2000 to 2015, to Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, a collective who put in the spotlight this pizzica that has fallen into dishented during her training in 1975. Since then, she had a spectacular Renaissance, symbolized by the creation, in 1998, of the Festival La Notte Della Taranta, in the village of Melpignano, of which Maria Mazzotta was to join the orchestra eight years later. “Today there is tourism linked to the pizzicashe notes, speaking in French. When I started, she only survived in small villages, with the elderly. It was still a culture of peasants. »»
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