Somatic resistance and social justice:
bitten bitten

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In southern Italy “pizzica pizzica” or “bitten bitten” is a traditional dance called the dance of the Tarantula. “Pizzica” is a Salentine version of the nationwide dance called Tarantella. The traditional dance form grew out of a myth where women were believed to become possessed after being bitten by a Tarantula, hence its commonly known name “The Dance of the Spider Women”. The ritual is traditionally associated with oppressed women who upon being bitten by the tarantula would start writhing on the ground and become increasingly delirious as they become infected with the poison. Accompanied by frenetic folk music, the afflicted women would eventually rise to stomp on the ground, convulse, dance wildly, chaotically and in circles for days, until the experience peaks and fades away.

This video is a solo outcome from one of six movement scores composed for collective practice research of ecological entanglements, within the cauldron of polycrisis. This is one example of how I approach somatic resistance as inquiry, and the body as a political archive of our times. The concept for this piece threads the symbolism of the bitten women convulsing, with the guided imagery of a spider weaving a web, and the myth of hysteria in the history of women’s madness. The work builds on histories of collective action in critical mental health, marked by a resistance toward oppressive norms.

Thanks to the formative more-than-human encounters with a tickling spider on Hampstead Heath, and the moist damp body of Queens Wood, in the creation of this work.

Key texts:

“The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience” and “Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness” by psychologist and Foucauldian Jane Ussher, and her historical analysis of how power shapes knowledge about subjectivities, tracing the different ways feminised knowledges have been delegitimised across the ages - to the persecution of women as witches in Medieval Times; “Staying with the Trouble” by Donna Haraway, her String Figure theory and what she calls “sympoietic”, interdependent, and multispecies storytelling of “response-ability”, as a “collective knowing and doing”.

Music: Nine Inch Nails 3 Ghosts I