PIET(R)A 

Lead artists/researchers: Fabrizio Manco & Helen Spackman
Performers: Anna Laura Alifuoco, Ioanna Danezi, Pamela Lanyero, Fabrizio Manco, Helen Spackman, Emmet Ward
Performative Documentation: Ernst Fischer

Based on material created during the summer of 2005 for site-specific performances in Galatina, Salento, Southern Italy, PIET(R)A draws on the now extant Salentine ritual practices of tarantism and the prefica, collaging fragments of dream, memory & myth and juxtaposing visual & verbal/ written imagery as cryptic counterpoints to, rather than direct illustrations of, a fundamental fable. Structured in seven stations, the piece begins/ ends with this story; in between, a cyclical journey of remembrance of lost moments recollected, remarked and transformed, for once upon a time, if not for ever after… This second incarnation of PIET(R)A marks our re-embarkation to uncanny terrain, exploring tales of love, the mourning before, blindness, petrification and the quest for sanctuary, themes perhaps 'known of old and long familiar', but re-visited, never the Same …

The piece aims to:

• arouse the spectator's interest and sustain her/ his attention?
• explore the relationship between play, ritual and narrative?
• trans-locate the atmosphere of the performances' original site&sound-specificity, without recourse to the obvious solution of videated projection?
• create multi-valent imagery that both exposes and subverts patriarchal narratives relating to the body, gender and sexuality?
• revise past and recorded experience and open the text on various micro/macro narratives?