Alessandro Mallamaci

U Stegg!

2012

U Stegg!, a travelling stage of dance and instruments from the southern Aspromonte, is held at Cataforio and neighbouring areas in the province of Reggio Calabria and each of its two yearly editions (summer and winter) lasts a week. Participants can follow traditional courses of local dance, bagpipes, tambourine, mouth organ, the Calabrian lyre, beating guitar.

Unlike other didactic activities held throughout Calabria, this stage has direct contact with the world of dance and music of pastoral and peasant origin. There is no proper stage or amplification, simply “feste a ballu” (dance festivals) held among the lanes and houses … “all’usu anticu”, the way they used to do it. Teaching is through the usual oral channels of observing and repeating together with the local master players and dancers, while every evening it is possible to participate in a festival in different places throughout southern Aspromonte.

There is no archaeological or nostalgic objective behind this, rather the desire to maintain a direct human dimension of the festival, the way the local people have always enjoyed it.

Years
2012
Man playing a frame drum by firelight at night, dancers around him
Elderly man in a flat cap playing a wind instrument outdoors, people listening on the grass
Young man playing a diatonic accordion, another musician beside him
Two men making a drum among pine trees, stretching the skin over the frame
Crowd reaching out with hands and tambourines, faces lit from the front
Woman playing guitar alone in a bare room, an office chair beside her
Hands laying rounds of dough into a wood-fired oven
Elderly man playing a diatonic accordion in the middle of a crowd
Frame drums held up in a dancing crowd
Hands working the bellows and keys of an accordion
Elderly man singing beside a young accordion player at a night gathering
Three generations with instruments in front of a brick wall, a child watching
Couple dancing outdoors at night, a crowd behind them
Man holding an accordion, looking out over a wide valley
Group playing frame drums in a pine wood
Man dancing on a wooden stage encircled by seated onlookers
Two dancers holding hands against the light at night
Woman dancing among figures in the dark, seen between two silhouettes
Musicians moving through a street, the picture blurred by their motion
Dancers under a bright light in a crowded room
Dancers on a paved square ringed by a standing crowd
View through the trees over a valley and a wide dry riverbed at dusk