Archivi tag: neo-avant-garde

“tuning in the neo-avant-garde: experimental radio plays in the postwar period”

Sandro Ricaldone

TUNING IN THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE
Experimental Radio Plays in the Postwar Period
edited by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs, Pim Verhulst
Manchester University Press, 2021

Bringing together an international and diverse group of scholars, Tuning in to the neo-avant-garde offers the first in-depth study of the radio medium’s significance as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde in the postwar period. Covering radio works from the 1950s until the 2010s, the collection charts how artists across the UK, Europe and North America continued as well as reacted to the legacies of the historical avant-garde and modernism, operating within different national broadcasting contexts, by placing radio in an intermedial dialogue with prose, poetry, theatre, music and film. In doing so, the volume explores a wide variety of acoustic genres – radio play, feature, electroacoustic music, radiophonic poem, radio opera – to show that the medium deserves to occupy a more central place than it currently does in studies of literature, (inter)media(lity) and the (neo-)avant-garde.

gianluca rizzo: “poetry on stage”

Sandro Ricaldone

GIANLUCA RIZZO
The Theatre of the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde
University of Toronto Press, 2020

Poetry on Stage focuses on exchanges between the writers of the Italian neo-avant-garde with the actors, directors, and playwrights of the Nuovo Teatro. The book sheds light on a forgotten chapter of twentieth-century Italian literature, arguing that the theatre was the ideal incubator for stylistic and linguistic experiments and a means through which authors could establish direct contact with their audience and verify the solutions they were devising to the practical and theoretical problems raised by their stances in politics and poetics. A robust textual analysis of a number of exemplary texts grounds these issues in the plays and poems produced at the time, and connects them with the experimentations subsequently carried out by some of the same artists.

In-depth interviews with four of the most influential figures in the field – critic Valentina Valentini, actor and director Pippo Di Marca, author Giuliano Scabia, and the late poet Nanni Balestrini – conclude the volume, providing an invaluable first-hand testimony that brings back to life the people and controversies discussed.