Culture is an Infinite Receptacle with No Border
Written and Performed by Ivan Dalia
UNDER St. Marks | 94 St Marks Place, New York, NY 10009
November 6 and November 9, 2025
It is with Ivan Dalia’s characteristic blend of artful wit and disarming levity that he ushers us into a piano-led odyssey—one that glides, with unassuming virtuosity, across the vast terrains of classical repertoire, vocal traditions, orchestral textures, and those formidable operatic arias that have long served as lodestars in the Western canon. In his performance of Culture is an Infinite Receptacle with No Border, Dalia is not content merely to play these works; he interrogates them, sifts through their layers, and retrieves from their historical sediment the cultural impulses that animated their creation. What emerges is less a recital than a restless inquiry, a meditative pursuit of origins in which the past is not a museum specimen but a living, wheeling companion to the modern song.
He gives us the history of the land and the people from the get-go: To speak of the earliest inhabitants of what we now call Italy is to lift the curtain on a sprawling prologue—an overture of migrations and cultural convergences that foreshadows the vast historical drama to come. Long before Rome seized the world’s imagination, the peninsula was a stage upon which Indo-European peoples made their first tentative entrances, around 2000 B.C., their arrival not unlike the quiet but consequential opening notes of a symphony that has yet to reveal its most resounding themes. These early tribes, wandering in successive waves since the mid–3rd millennium B.C., constitute the primordial chorus of the Italian story. But no epic remains the province of a single cast for long. In the 9th century B.C., the Etruscans strode onto the scene with the confident bearing of a fully formed civilization. Settling in the fertile region between the Arno and Tiber rivers, they brought with them not only advanced artistry and ritual but a theatrical sense of civic life—an intricate choreography of governance, religion, and craftsmanship that would leave an indelible impress on all who followed. Their rise and eventual subjugation by the Romans read like a classical tragedy: a culture of great refinement overtaken by the inexorable momentum of an empire in the making.
Meanwhile, from across the Ionian waters, the Greeks made their own dramatic entrance, beginning around the 8th century B.C. They established colonies in the sun-bathed south, transforming that region into the storied Magna Graecia—a kind of shimmering annex of Hellenic thought and aesthetic sensibility. Their settlements brought philosophy, architecture, and a cultivated sense of beauty to the peninsula, as if unveiling an ambitious new set piece just when the narrative demanded it. And then, of course, there is Rome—the city whose founding in 753 B.C. by the Latins has become the stuff of mythic prologue and imperial lore. These Latins, themselves an Indo-European people, gathered alongside Etruscans and Sabines to form a population as heterogeneous as a well-cast ensemble. In this mingling of tribes—each offering its own dialect, ritual, and worldview—we find the embryonic Rome, a community whose very origins embody the layered complexity that would define its future. Thus the pre-Roman peninsula emerges not as a barren prelude but as a densely peopled, ever-shifting stage on which cultures entered, overlapped, receded, and reemerged—an intricate historical ballet whose movements set the tone for the grand saga of Italy yet to unfold.
For Dalia, musical time is elastic. His talents allow him to slip with improbable ease between centuries, inviting his listeners to travel alongside him not as passive observers but as co-conspirators in discovery. At the core of this itinerary lies a resolute commitment to humanity—not the humanity of royal courts and aristocratic salons, but that of ordinary people whose lives, joys, and griefs forged the emotional clay from which these works were shaped. Dalia insists, with quiet but firm conviction, that art’s most durable truths are born not in palaces but in the shared experiences of the working classes, those who labored, dreamed, and sang without expectation of historical remembrance. He further instructs in what we know as Greco-Roman tradition from the Greeks that landed on Italy’s southwest coast, "One race, one face" (originally the Italian "Una faccia, una razza") a phrase used to describe the shared cultural and historic heritage between Greeks and Italians, particularly Southern Italians.
Mindful of this lineage, Dalia urges us not to overlook the circumstances of art’s own birth—the societal weather, the personal tempests, and the communal rituals that serve as the invisible scaffolding of every composition he touches. His piano becomes less an instrument than an instrument of inquiry, offering narrative as readily as melody. The origins and evolutions embedded within his selections provoke a renewed curiosity about what truly catalyzes artistic expression: is it necessity, delight, despair, or some ineffable compound of all three? Highlights of the live program include la tarantella di Montemarano; "Lo Guarracino," a humorous Neapolitan tarantella about a fish named Guarracino who tries to win the love of a sardine; Fabrizio De André’s “La domenica delle salme,” the very political Corpse Sunday; Dino Paul Crocetti (Dean Martin’s) “That’s Amore”; Kramer Gorni’s “un bacio a mezzanotte”; and Ennio Morricone’s Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso. The operatic arias he summons, rendered through both lyrical and instrumental adaptation, function as miniature time capsules. Each bears the imprint of its historical moment, charting not only the aesthetic preferences of its era but the shifting tides of cultural, geographical, and linguistic identity. Under Dalia’s perceptive guidance, these arias cease to be museum pieces and instead pulse with the vitality of human stories—stories of migration, resilience, longing, and reinvention.
What Dalia ultimately provides is a rare combination of simplicity and sophistication. His commentary is accessible without ever being reductive, illuminating without succumbing to pedantry. The pleasure of the evening resides not only in the music’s lush surface but also in the underlying currents he reveals—those often contradictory implications that art has held for humanity across time. In this brilliant presentation, he reminds us that every piece of music is both a testament to its age and a mirror held up to our own, asking us to listen anew to the continuities and tensions that shape the ever-evolving human condition.
Do not consign yourself to the regret of discovering Ivan only after he has been summoned to grace yet another festival stage. His brilliance, thankfully, is not some rare comet that streaks across the cultural firmament only once in a great while. On the contrary, he may be found with gratifying regularity seated at the piano of Osteria San Carlo in Soho, or weaving his enchantments amid the velvety ambiance of the Russian Samovar in the Theater District—venues that become, under his touch, intimate chambers of revelation.
Whether he adopts the guise of lecturer, raconteur, or pure musician, Ivan proves himself irresistibly engaging in every format he elects to inhabit. He is that rare performer whose charisma glows even in repose, a figure who seems to carry with him the faint shimmer of a footlight wherever he goes. To witness him is not merely to attend a performance, but to partake in a small, shimmering event. He is a charmer of the highest order, and a must-see presence in whatever corner of the city he chooses to alight.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on December 1, 2025 All rights reserved.