Dance Me to Grace (2024) reinterprets the ritual of tarantism through contemporary dance.Tarantism is generally understood as a state of extreme hysteria characterized by the person falling into a state of mental crisis, which ancient beliefs attributed to the bite of the tarantula. To restore the “tarantolata” to a normal state, a dance-and-music ceremony was held, during which the woman would abandon herself to a frenzied dance in which she simulated, with convulsive movements, the struggle against the spider that had injected her with venom. The goal of the ritual was the symbolic death of the spider.

Tarantism was a ritual present in southern Italy since the Middle Ages, but it was not until the early 1900s that the psychosocial nature of the phenomenon was recognized.

Dance Me to Grace seeks to revive an extinct social practice that, despite being carried out in a society plagued by illiteracy, employed a form of psychotherapy (bioenergetics) as a means of healing one’s own traumas. Mental health is a topic that is only now beginning to receive attention.