Dance plays integral role in annual W.Va. Italian Heritage Festival

Sep. 4—CLARKSBURG — Music is a big component of Italian culture and with it comes dancing.

Rose Mazza, one of the directors of the West Virginia Italian Heritage Dancers, preserves some of that tradition each year at the Italian Heritage Festival held in Clarksburg.

The dancers have been part of the festival from the very beginning. Those early days lacked any sophisticated audio and video equipment, much less a stage. However, the festival founders wanted something that evoked traditional Italian culture, and approached Ramona Rose Rodriguez, a local dance teacher, to organize a dance exhibition.

"They asked her if she would put together a group of dancers and perform some Italian folk dancing," Mazza said. "She put together a group of ladies and gentlemen. They performed for many, many years. And for a long time, they were the only entertainment that the festival had."

For the first few years the group performed on the pavement, until members of the community, including Rose Mazza's father in-law as well as her husband, helped build a wooden stage for them to perform on.

Today, the group performs a variety of dances that were common at the turn of the 20th century. There's the tarantella, the fan dance, Bella Ciao, a skirt dance and even a maypole dance, which made its return to the festival this year after a 30-year absence.

"Each one of our dances has a meaning," Rose Mazza said. "Like when we do our skirt dance, that was done by girls at a wedding and they insist it's sort of like a flirtatious type of dance. So each dance that we do have has a meaning behind it."

For example, the maypole dance consists of a 10 foot tall pole with ribbons attached to it. Ten or 12 young women hold onto the ribbons and dance around the pole, careful to not get tangled. Should they get tangled, bad luck will follow.

"If it doesn't get tangled, then they're going to have a good marriage," Louis Mazza, Rose's husband and the group's carpenter, said. He built the maypole for the performance. "But if it gets tangled, then they're going to get a divorce. And that's what they're doing."

To complement the dance styles, the dancers also wear clothing reminiscent of what would have been worn by women in Italy also at the turn of century.

For Regina Maria XXVII Bryanna DeFazio, preserving the dance tradition of her ancestors is a way to honor the hardships they went through after immigrating to the U.S.

"I know many of the people that are celebrating this weekend, have stories that they've heard from their family, I have stories of my great grandmother being mistreated when she got to this country and the hardships that she went through," she said. "So for that reason I preserve it and why it's important for me."

Although DeFazio lives in New Jersey now, she still returns every year for the festival. It's ingrained into who she is.

It's also something she wants to pass on to the next generation. She just got engaged, and envisions passing her traditions she's picked up over the years to her children. Her desire isn't even bound to her own children. Prior to going onstage, DeFazio helped a little boy unrelated to her learn a dance so he could join in the communal dancing later when the group was performing.

However, action must be married to meaning, DeFazio said.

"I think it's really important for the younger generations to know why, why we are doing this," she said. "Why did this become something that is so familiar that I don't know how I got involved with it? I like to keep that piece there too."

It all ties back to the cultural makeup of West Virginia. Rose Mazza said that at one point, 65% of the population of Harrison, Marion, Monongalia and even Lewis County were Italian.

"It's important for us to preserve all these cultural literary events, to pass them down to our children and great grandchildren and so forth," Rose Mazza said. "So they can just keep on carrying on the tradition. I think that's why this festival was created in Clarksburg, West Virginia. There are a lot of Italian people here."

Dance is also a way to bring people together, which is the main goal of the festival. The performances not only evoke the spirit of Italian heritage, they also provide a common bond for attendees at the festival to connect over. Which leads into the most powerful aspect of Italian traditions, unity.

"This is what this festival is all about," Louis Mazza said. "We try to show everybody the love, that chokes me up, that we have for everybody. And I mean that we try to love everybody, no matter what race they are. Everybody this weekend, is Italian."

Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com