Student Demonstrates History of the Italian Tarantella Dance

 

Vera Lynn, presenter, (left) with her Mom Linda Viscusi Lentini and Uncle Dr. Robert Viscusi, author

Hempstead, NY - Coro D'Italia member and Montclair State University Graduate Student Vera Lentini presents a talk entitled "The Italian Tarantella" in which she showcases her findings from ethnographic research alongside of digital artifacts from the 80-year-old Coro D'Italia troupe. Her presentation which is part of the 45th annual Italian American Studies Association (IASA) conference "E Pluribus: What is Italian America?” encourages Italian-Americans to uncover their own traditions in a scholarly light.

At the conference held the last weekend of November hundreds of scholars gather to participate in a forum that includes individual presentations and roundtables on poetry, theory, food, cultural studies, literature and any and all subjects having to do with Italian-American life.

Vera’s presentation tells the story of the third or fourth generation Italian-American discovering his roots through the Tarantella, which is a dance of Mediterranean people and Peasants who left their lives and migrated to places like America, being part of a larger trend of migrations away from rural society and towards the cosmopolitan.

In her paper Vera considers the Italian American folk song as being a facet of Italian-American life and social contexts, including weddings, community events, healing rituals and even dance competitions. Drawing on folk, cultural studies and performance studies scholarship, Vera explores changes that occur as the Tarantella changes contexts and functions as Stuart Hall’s “retelling of past histories,” enabling us to change the “ways we positions ourselves.”In this place between the old and the new, Italians fashion collective and individual identities, and in America Italians have negotiated with media representations and identity in an attempt to re-create the history of the past.

An Italian-American from New Jersey, Vera has made the trip to Italy six times, completed research at New York University, and is excited to share Italian culture with others.

Vera is a Graduate Assistant in the English Department at Montclair State University and former tutor at the Rutgers Plangere Writing Center. She has published a study of Mediterranean songs and dance in A Sud dell’Europa –DallaCarta di Barcellona all’Unione per il Mediterraneo as well as a collection of poems in the Plangere publication “Writing Identities”. A Phi Beta Kappa scholar and a former Rutgers College Presidential Scholar, Vera plans to complete her Master’s Degree and teach first-year writing.