‘It takes away my melancholy’: liscio, the glamorous Italian club scene for older people & More News Here

Vittorio Piovani is a barber in Traversetolo, a village in central Italy. Every Sunday, he dons a chic go well with, shines his footwear, curls his lengthy moustache and goes dancing at a club in a close-by city, like many different weekend clubbers. Except Piovani is a 75-year-old grandfather of three, residing for a scene that provides him a deep-rooted sense of group and belonging.

Piovani is a diehard fan of liscio, an Italian music style and dancing scene, with devoted venues known as balere, and a fandom that’s usually over 50 (extra typically, over 65). In its personal method, it’s a glamorous, wild and countercultural nook of European clubbing. The music is effervescent – with plenty of accordion – and the aesthetic is unmistakable: band members put on satin clothes and bell-bottom fits, with plenty of shiny material and sequins; patrons gown up as in the event that they have been attending a marriage. “Liscio has everything: a bit of waltz, a bit of polka, a bit of tango and a bit of slow-dance,” Piovani says inside the club, Redas.

Decades in the past, liscio dominated central Italy, particularly the area of Emilia-Romagna, nevertheless it has gone right into a gradual decline and now some worry that Covid may need put the last nail in the coffin. Dance halls have been closed, on-and-off, for virtually two years, earlier than they have been allowed to totally reopen when Italy lifted its state of emergency legal guidelines this spring. Some of them had shut down for good; others have reopened, however modified style.

When I go to on a Sunday afternoon, Redas is full and about 150 people are lined up even earlier than the venue is open. “Here we are – for the most part elderly people,” says Ornella, a retired clerk in her 70s. She has been a liscio aficionada since she was younger, when the native Communist celebration organised summer time festivals that included liscio dances. Claudia, 69, a prepare dinner, comes twice per week, on Thursday evenings and Sundays, as a result of “ballroom dancing is good for my health and takes away my melancholy”.

Many of the people at Redas have a particular relationship with the Lucchi-Venturi orchestra, who’re enjoying tonight: “Of course we also hear other orchestras, but this one is special for us, it’s like there’s no distance between musicians and the audience,” says Letizia, who follows the orchestra round Italy together with her husband, Massimo. When the band celebrated its twenty fifth anniversary, proper earlier than the pandemic, the couple attended a three-day dancing celebration at a Lake Como lodge.

The orchestra’s namesake and accordionist, Barbara Lucchi, is a star – in the Eighties she was a frequent visitor on TV. Together together with her husband, Massimo Venturi, additionally an accordionist, she leads a band of eight members, for the second reduce right down to 4. In the Nineteen Nineties, her orchestra was enjoying 300 concert events annually, which had fallen to about 130 earlier than Covid hit: “It was a complete disaster, during and after the pandemic,” she says. “Liscio artists were hit the worst.”

True, all reside music was hit by lockdowns and restrictions, however liscio suffered significantly badly as a result of its viewers was extra susceptible to the virus and extra cautious about returning. “We had many losses; members of our public have died,” says Lucchi. “Even now, not everyone feels like coming back, and those who do are dancing less often.” Moreover, liscio is about dancing in {couples} and is incompatible with social distancing.

Liscio, seemed down on by Italian mainstream tradition as a result of it’s perceived as provincial, low-class and much too camp, has a strongly native and working-class dimension. Its roots are in peasant dancing gala’s at the daybreak of the twentieth century, when Carlo Brighi, a violinist who performed with Arturo Toscanini, tailored central European dances, comparable to the waltz, polka and mazurka, to an Italian style. But the style as it’s recognized right this moment was born in the aftermath of the second world conflict, when violinist and composer Secondo Casadei added fashionable components comparable to saxophone, drums and vocalists, and have become a nationwide star. His Fifties hit Romagna mia remains to be a traditional.

Liscio was the solely dance native to Italy that survived the import of American genres, comparable to swing and boogie-woogie, says music critic Giulia Cavaliere. Its success, she explains, was in its romantic enchantment: “It’s about dancing and eroticism. The balere were places where women dressed up to attract a companion, and where dance was a precursor to a kiss.” But there’s additionally a component of sophistication redemption: “For the whole week, you are a farmer or a factory worker, but at the weekend you dress up, and for two days you have a different social role.”

Liscio additional boomed in the Nineteen Sixties and 70s, with orchestras comparable to Vera Romagna, Vittorio Borghesi, and Castellina e Pasi getting huge excursions. The star of that period was Raoul Casadei, Secondo’s nephew, who died final 12 months aged 83. Remembered as “il re del Liscio,” Casadei was an icon of the 70s, even past the liscio circles, along with his concert events aired on TV, and such a robust family title that different orchestras randomly took the Casadei title to trick the public into believing there was some type of connection.

But since the Nineteen Nineties, liscio has suffered a gradual, if gradual, decline – too distinct to resume itself with out dropping its aficionados, however perceived as passé by youthful Italians. “Back in the day, the clubs were always full and so many orchestras could find good work. Now, a big crowd comes only if big names are playing,” says Venturi. “This used to be a good job, even if you played in a smaller orchestra, but that’s no longer the case.” The financial disaster has prompted some orchestras to chop down on prices, even resorting to karaoke backing tracks, whereas others merely swap to extra worthwhile genres comparable to Latin American dance.

“Liscio is becoming lower quality, more repetitive,” laments Moreno Conficconi, a clarinettist, vocalist and arranger who lately based, with singer Mauro Ferrara and jazz performer Mirco Mariani, a music mission known as Extraliscio aiming at modernising the fashion, gleefully contaminating it with punk and electronica.

To liscio followers, Conficconi is a legend: he began to play in 1972 and served as head of orchestra to Raoul Casadei, who gave him the nickname of “il biondo,” by which he nonetheless goes right this moment (even when he was by no means blond). But his fellow Extraliscio crew come from totally different backgrounds and – given liscio’s low cultural standing – they received some raised eyebrows. Mariani says that, when different jazz musicians realized he was doing a liscio mission, “they were so surprised that they thought I must be having some affair with a liscio girl. To them it was just second-class music”.

Extraliscio now get pleasure from some status and have been invited to San Remo, Italy’s most prestigious music pageant, however Cavaliere, the critic, doubts that that status will lengthen to the complete style and says that its decline has deep roots. “Liscio revolved around small communities that gathered in squares and balere, but today young people don’t have that connection to their micro-community – they want to break away from it.”

Conficconi, says that Covid acted “like a guillotine”, to a whole lot of orchestras, and when golf equipment may lastly reopen they didn’t get the public that that they had hoped for, whereas Venturi says liscio goes to ultimately die: “You don’t find any young person in a balera; the world changes.” But Conficconi says hope is just not misplaced: “It’s a music that brings people together; people have found love dancing liscio. It can’t just disappear.”

Back at Redas Lucchi proclaims: “Now we’re doing the polka challenge!” The crowd erupts in cheers: they dance, chat and drink for hours, nonetheless having the time of their lives.

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