The Men Who Dance the Giglio

The Men Who Dance the Giglio explores the way a local Italian-American community represents itself in a religious festival that originated in southern Italy in the late Middle Ages. Over the course of two weeks each July, a series of festivities are enacted, the most important of which is the dancing of the giglio and the boat--the focus of this documentary. A massive eight-story, two-and-a-half ton structure, the Brooklyn giglio is a replica of the original Italian tower, comprised of paper-maché saints, angels, and flowers and a giant platform large enough to hold a singer and a ten-person brass-and-drum band. In all, it takes 128 lifters (paranza) to heave the giglio aloft, raise the huge tower, walk it forward, and then--in what is referred to as dancing the giglio--rotate and bounce it. Each lift is led by a different capoparanza (or conductor) who shouts out orders to the 128 men under the tower. After several hours of lifting and dancing in the streets, surrounded by some 5000 enthusiastic onlookers, the boat and giglio meet in a symbolically charged moment in front of the church. No longer the dominant ethnic group in this Brooklyn neighborhood, the Italian-Americans sponsoring the festival see this annual performance as an occasion to reaffirm an ethnic identity eroded by broad demographic changes. This exclusively male performance also provides an occasion for expressing a masculine identity in which male strength is equated with religious and ethnic devotion. The strenuous lifting of the giglio--which requires brute force combined with collective effort and leadership--stands as an icon for trust in continuity and community defined largely in paternalistic terms. Above all, the documentary calls attention to the way various members of the neighborhood, along with the giglio performers themselves, mythologize the significance of the festival, portraying the St. Paulinus feast as the definitive event in the life of their community. The Men Who Dance the Giglio is comprised of footage from the 1995 Feast of St. Paulinus, along with several interviews with local participants and organizers.