For the series of meetings on the sacred feminine curated by Barbara Crescimanno of the CHOROS association, we are publishing the interview that took place online on the Arci Tavola Tonda Facebook page on 29 January 2022 with Luciana Percovich with the theme:
The vision of the Sacred in the European Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures.
We are used to thinking of the singing voice as prayer but long before singing, millennia before words were born to express concepts, dance and shared rhythm were the first "languages" to communicate the sense of the sacred and to create the perception of community togetherness .
This is because Rhythm, in the form of percussive sound, and in the form of dance movement, is a real technical tool that creates connections: between women and men, between human beings and the cosmos.
In this meeting we will dialogue with Luciana Percovich on the birth of the sense of the sacred, connecting it with the birth of the concept of rhythm and the first forms of percussion, with the first Mediterranean dance circles and the first percussionists.
From the organizer:
LUCIANA PERCOVICH, one of the reference points in Italy for research on the sacred in the feminine.
From the archaeological documentation concerning music and dance in Sicily emerges a culture deeply intertwined with the threads of the feminine, linked to the Nymphs (and then to the Muses, Sibyls, Sirens, Bacchae): historical-mythological figures common to the entire Mediterranean since the Paleolithic and traces of which remain – refunctionalised – to this day. In the Milanese feminist movement (Feminist Struggle, Feminist Group for a Women's Medicine, Women's Bookshop, Women's Free University), in the 70s you directed the non-fiction series Il Vaso di Pandora – La Salamandra Edizioni. You have written in various magazines dealing with medicine, science, anthropology, mythology. You collaborated with the Laima association of Turin in the organization of the international conferences Indigenous Cultures of Peace (2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016). Since 2005 you have directed the women's history and spirituality series Le Civette Saggi for the Venexia publishing house. You are part of the editorial staff of the research and dissemination website www.preistoriainitalia.it
Books:
Consciousness in the body. Women, health and medicine in the seventies – Franco Angeli – 2005;
Dark Shining Mothers. The roots of the sacred and religions – Venexia – 2007;
She who gives life. She who gives shape – Venexia – 2009; Towards the Place of Origins. A journey of research into the female self – Castelvecchi – 2016.
CHORÓS. Dances, Voices and Rhythms of Southern Italy.
Training course for educators, cultural operators, teachers, performers.
At the origins of the Western theatrical tradition is the Greek chorus, a 'collective character' which, in honor of Dionysus, god of intoxication, moves, dances and sings in unison.
The tragedy choir of the classical period was born on the archetype of the choirs of Nymphs and Muses, from which the initiatory choirs of adolescents and young women and men of the archaic Greek world also derive.
In Southern Italy and Sicily the oldest archaeological evidence regarding dance and music are linked to the ritual world of goddesses, their priestesses and offerers, and, until the last century, the frame drum was a purely female ritual instrument.
Anyone today who wants to study performing arts, theatre, singing, percussion, dance, must look to these roots, to a world in which what is today separated into different disciplines was born intertwined together.
The texts cited by Luciana Percovich are:
- The sacred in the feminine. Ritual figures and forms in the Mediterranean area between memory and contemporaneity (edited by Barbara Crescimanno) – European Printing Institute – Publishing House
- Luciana Percovich – Dark shining mothers. The roots of the sacred and religions – Venexia Publisher
- James Mellaart – Catal Huyuk: Neolithic Town in Anatolia – Thames & Hudson Ltd
- Layne Redmond – When women played the drums – Venexia publishing
