La Pizzica

Sue took this picture last night at a beer festival. A local folk group is playing a highly amplified Pizzica - a traditional dance of Puglia. The band have attitude and perform with a tight, intense rhythm. The dancers are a mix of locals and tourists and mostly they bounce up and down to the insistent beat in a variety of styles.

The couple in the foreground are different. They give the impression of having come here solely to dance the Pizzica and to have been dancing it all their lives. Their steps are precise and they are wholly focused on each other and the music. Sometimes their faces nearly touch and their arms intertwine, but they never actually make physical contact. Some other people in the crowd have noticed the nature of their dance and are watching or taking pictures, but the couple are oblivious. They are serving the dance not the spectators. They seem to be tapping into the ancient and ecstatic roots of the Pizzica. This is, at least, the impression they create.

Here in the South of Italy the past is never far away and it doesn't always have an easy or simple relationship with the present. For centuries the people of this region were mainly oppressed and landless peasants and the Pizzica speaks of this time. Today Puglia is part of a prosperous "modern" democracy, but the transition has come within the memory of those who are only in their thirties and forties. The local teenagers and twenty somethings recognise the dance as part of their heritage, but they don't know the steps and are more comfortable with the music played on MTV Italia. They join in the dance with their own freestyle or look on ambiguously from the fringes.

And what of our middle-aged couple? I feel sure they do come from Puglia, but they are far more likely to be schoolteachers or lawyers than subsistence farmers. And there is a good deal more self-consciousness to their dance than the romantic in me wants to believe. But the beat of the band drives on and on and more people throw themselves into the dance as the night draws in. Maybe it's the beer or maybe something ancient and half-forgotten really is being stirred in our blood.