Prague Tour 2007

Choreographic Starting Point

Nathaniel Bolton Drawings from Tarantella rehearsals

The choreographic starting point and galvanizing kernels for this project are a number of ancient, goddess-based, self-healing dance forms that originated in Africa and Egypt and have persisted throughout history in many cultures and religions. These dance forms are found in the myths, rituals, celebrations and popular dance expressions of people in both urban and rural settings, and they became deeply integrated into the fabric of daily life. Many of the dance forms migrated to southern Europe through trade, expansion and conquest; much later on they migrated to the New World with the millions of people who came to America looking for a better life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially to the San Francisco Bay Area and other regions of northern California with large immigrant populations. The other strand of similar dance, and perhaps even the same self-healing dance tradition, came to the Americas from Yoruba African cultural ancestry, musical movement and ritual memory to Cuba , the Caribbean and Brazil, as well as to the United States.