scholarly journals “The Many Languages of the Avant-Garde”: In conversation with Grzegorz Bral of Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre)

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (26) ◽  
pp. 45-63
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Sakowska

How to theorise and review avant-garde Shakespeare? Which theoretical paradigms should be applied when Shakespearean productions are multicultural and yet come from a specific locale? These and other many questions interrogating the language of performance in global avant-garde Shakespeare productions are put forward to Grzegorz Bral, the director of the Song of the Goat ensemble in the context of their evolving performance of Macbeth (2006/2008) and their Songs of Lear (2012).

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (26) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Sakowska

AbstractHow to theorise and review avant-garde Shakespeare? Which theoretical paradigms should be applied when Shakespearean productions are multicultural and yet come from a specific locale? These and other many questions interrogating the language of performance in global avant-garde Shakespeare productions are put forward to Grzegorz Bral, the director of the Song of the Goat ensemble in the context of their evolving performance of Macbeth (2006/2008) and their Songs of Lear (2012).


Author(s):  
Chris Mourant

Katherine Mansfield’s contemporaries knew her primarily as a contributor to magazines and periodicals. In 1922, for instance, Wyndham Lewis described her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. This book provides the first in-depth study of Mansfield’s engagement in periodical culture, examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Reading these writings against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, Chris Mourant situates Mansfield’s work within networks of production and uncovers the many ways in which she engaged with the writings of others and responded to the political, aesthetic and social contexts of early twentieth-century periodical culture. By examining Mansfield’s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer working both within and against the London literary establishment, in particular, this book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and proto-postcolonial writer.


Tempo ◽  
1989 ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Claire Polin

Certainly it was the year to visit the USSR, as one rubbed shoulders with pre-Summit reporters awaiting Reagan/Gorbachev, and pilgrims celebrating the millennium of Christianity in Russia. Wandering up the Nevsky Prospekt, you saw musicians hurrying with instrument cases in hand; and whichever way you crossed the Neva or the canals, the babel of language sounded like a session at the United Nations. As Tikhon Khrennikov (still Chairman of the Composers Union 40 years after its notorious 1948 Congress) pointed out in his welcoming address at the opening concert, the Festival's purpose was ‘for building spiritual bridges between nations using music as the unique and indispensable means of communication’. Stylistic restrictions were withdrawn so that listeners would get an unusually broad idea of the ‘many-sided panorama of modern musical art’. Thus, not only ‘serious’ music but also pop, jazz, folk, and traditional musics were performed. Having attended the previous two Festivals, it was very interesting to observe the progressive attitude of the Third. Not only was there more of everything, but more variety: not only symphonic, chamber, and choral music events, but also organ recitals, modern violin music, opera, children's theatre, a song evening, and even one for light music. Not only did the best Soviet conductors and performers participate, but also the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, jazz groups of the USSR and elsewhere, and the British avant-garde vocal group ‘Electric Phoenix’. Although the concerts were heavily weighted with Soviet works, still almost 40 countries were represented (from Cuba to Mongolia) with works by more than 150 living composers.


Author(s):  
Sean Alexander Gurd

In the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides in 406 BCE, Greek singers, poets, and theorists delved deep into auditory experience. They charted its capacity to develop topologies distinct from those of the other senses; contemplated its use as a communicator of information; calculated its power to express and cause extreme emotion. They made sound too, artfully and self-consciously creating songs and poems that revelled in sonorousness. Dissonance is about these extraordinary experiments in auditory experience. In three chapters—on auditory figures, affect, and melody respectively—the book aims to show the many points of commonality between ancient Greek auditory art and the concerns of contemporary sound studies, avant-garde music, and aesthetics, making the argument that “classical” Greek song and drama was, in fact, an early European avant-garde, a proto-exploration of the aesthetics of noise. The book thus develops an alternative to that romantic ideal which sees antiquity as a frozen world, a world we can contemplate as though we were the enchanted speaker in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for whom the silent stillness of an ancient vase symbolizes the survival of truths more lasting than the generations of humankind.


Edith Sitwell was a key figure in the establishment of a British avant-garde “scene” and in the development of a unique literary expression. Taken together, each of the contributors gives body to a serious reconsideration, even resurrection, of Sitwell's important place in British modernism. Overall, this book makes a place for the lost story of Sitwellism in modernist history. It shows how her place in that history depends on a continual public and private remaking of self. Further, this book gives substance to the type of avant-garde that she (and her brothers) worked to craft—ornamental and baroque—by exploring the affective traces it produced in melancholic camp and her notion of female poetry. Finally, it demonstrates some ways in which that effect also includes and even invites engagement with socio-historical discourses of class, gender, and empire. Altogether, this volume opens the way for a long and rich reconsideration of this crucial, central figure of British modernism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-478
Author(s):  
Marijeta Bozovic

Abstract The newest Russian poetic avant-garde wields highly aware appropriations and remediations in stark opposition to mainstream cultural phenomena, including nostalgia for the imperial and militant aestheticized politics of the Soviet Union. Efforts to think leftward beyond the state socialist past to a global egalitarian future challenge both Russian and “Western” narratives in our increasingly interconnected world. The Georgian-born Russian-language poet Keti Chukhrov, in particular, theorizes powerlessness in deeply local yet globally familiar ways. Despite the many voices rumbling through her work, Chukhrov’s theses are consistent: art must be communist; all desire, even faked, is political eros; and the post-Soviet subject is not even dead. Chukhrov embeds her politics in institutional critique, lends her labor to collectives and collaborations, and refracts her poetic voice into multitudes.


Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 178
Author(s):  
Will Fleming

In this paper, I seek to contribute to the resurrection from critical obscurity of an overlooked tradition in contemporary Irish poetry: namely, that of small-press poetic experimentalism. Taking as a case study the Dublin-based New Writers’ Press (NWP, established 1967), I will interrogate the absence of virtually any mention of small Irish experimental presses in critical narratives of late modernist poetry of the British Isles in the 1960s and 1970s. By using an array of insights gleaned from the many letters, typescripts and other ephemera in the NWP archive housed at the National Library of Ireland, such absences in scholarship are explored in the context of what the press’ founding editors faced in navigating the small Irish poetry market of the mid-twentieth century. Through this archival lens, the reasons why a cohesive avant-garde network of British and Irish poetic experimentalists never materialised are analysed, and an argument for how Irish poetic experiments of the last half century have not received anywhere near the same degree of critical attention as those of their British counterparts will emerge. In the first half of this paper, I focus on the Irish commercial poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately illustrating how narrow and competitive it was in comparison to the British market, as well as the peculiar individual context of an Irish campus magazine, Trinity College’s Icarus (1950-). This will in turn suggest that the absence of presses such as NWP from critical accounts of late modernist poetic experimentalism may well be due to editorial decisions made by those Irish presses themselves. In the second half of this paper, I foreground some important archival evidence to review a number of instances in NWP’s history in which it comes close to forging alliances with presses within the more cohesive British experimental scene, though it never manages to do so. Drawing on this evidence, I present an archival basis for counterarguments to the possible conclusion that the responsibility for the general absence of Irish presses from narratives of small-press experimentalism lies with those Irish presses themselves.


DIALOGO ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-279
Author(s):  
Ilenia Gioia

This contribution underlines the conditions in which we are living, as a consequence of the pandemic events that have impacted the whole world. It is also intended to discuss possible strategies to be adopted for territorial, economic and social revitalization. Many companies have developed research and examples useful to the revaluation of the spaces of the city and that suggest the areas in which to invest to achieve this goal. It is also addressed the issue of the resilient periphery, a topic that has become extremely current if you try to consider the virus positively as a catalyst for opportunities. Speaking of the periphery, the example of a residential complex in Posillipo, Italy, is examined. An avant-garde project in a residential context in which, to this day, despite the many qualities of the neighborhood, its shortcomings are strongly felt: services not easily accessible, absent transportation, etc. In conclusion, having suggested the possible strategies and approaches to be adopted, it is hoped that with the funds made available, the idea of territorial recovery and enhancement can really become a reality.


Tempo ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (263) ◽  
pp. 60-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Iddon

AbstractThe word ‘Darmstadt’ has come to stand for a broad set of discursive tropes: whether positive or negative, the word is often used as a convenient shorthand for organising ways of thinking about music in the post-war era. I suggest that, after the many symbolic deaths of the avant-garde, the word Darmstadt has come to function, too, as a sort of Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, an idea which need have little to do with the father ‘proper’: rather it is a structuring principle, one which authorises and delimits the boundaries of the known, the prescribed and proscribed world. I argue, too, that the death of that symbolic father, however it becomes extended and perpetuated, surely presages rupture and collapse within the symbolic order. From this position, I examine the ways in which various spectres of Darmstadt – borrowing from Derrida's Marxian hauntologie – return, both within the world of New Music and beyond.


Author(s):  
Ross Hair

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.


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