Body, Emotion, and Sound in the Contemporary Galician Poetry Performance

Thamyris/Intersecting No. 24 (2011) 111–132 Politics of Sound: Body, Emotion, and Sound in the Contemporary Galician Poetry Performance María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar The Middle Ages were considered to be the golden age of Galician literature. After this, literary production in Galician was for centuries predominantly oral. During the second half of the nineteenth century the cultural and political movement known as the Rexurdimento (Renaissance) led to a radical transformation of this situation. Authors such as Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Curros Enríquez, and Eduardo Pondal – the canonical trio of the Rexurdimento – began to forge a new linguistic and literary model. The recognition of Galicia as a political entity was fostered, in large part, by Romantic sensibilities towards oral and popular cultural traditions. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, several groups and poetic waves would follow – some of these notably influenced by the historic avant-garde. The generational suc- cession was severed by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Like Basque and Catalan literatures, Galician culture also faced harsh repression during the reign of Franco and it was only with the arrival of democracy that something approaching cultural normality could be reestablished.1 In the 1980s the inclusion of the Galician language into the teaching system ushered in a new era for the Galician culture. From the 1980s, Galician poetry begins to move through new avenues such as poetry performance. The poetic discourse and generational controversy that find their precedents in the avant-garde run parallel to this. The clash between the “poets of the eighties” and the “poets of the nineties” has been much remarked upon, even though the most recent critical approaches tend to relativize the opposition between the two groups.2 This essay aims to explore what the commitment to orality of Galician poets and performers since the 1990s has meant for both Galicia’s poetry and the performance of poetry in general. Even though Galician poetry can claim some isolated examples Politics of Sound | 111 of video-art and its entrance into digital technologies is more and more evident, perhaps the most surprising phenomenon from a historical point of view has been the return to the oral. A symptom of this change was the proliferation of poetic read- ings during the second half of the nineties. Since the year 2000, the presence of the voice in performance has acquired a poetic and political relevance which I will address later on. In focusing on contemporary poetry performance, I would also like to test the extent to which this practice succeeds in modifying certain ideological presupposi- tions held by Galician cultural agents. Since the Rexurdimento, and as a product of the influence of Herderian romanticism, Galician poetry and the nationalist project have been interlinked, a connection which continues to this day. In this context, it is useful to determine whether poetry performance increases or decreases the strength of this bond. In this analysis of Galician poetry performance I will prioritize the relationship between body, voice, and affect. In what way do these align themselves in order to enable specific performances? Does their presence or absence in a performance enable different political and poetic projects? In the past, concepts of body, voice, and affect established singular approaches to performance; perhaps their useful- ness can be exponentially multiplied when one observes their interaction as a whole. One example of the possibilities that open up when assessing this triad of body, voice, and affect is the recognition of two distinct types of poetry performance, which I shall denominate as either timbral or accentual. Timbral performances I conceive as actions based on the relevant weight given to the emotional substratum of the poetic presentation. These emotions not only affect the performers carrying them out, but rather (and especially) the public that receives them. To a large extent, the efficiency of timbral performances lies in their flight from narrative codes. This non-narrativity also supposes the rejection of meta- narratives,3 sacrificed in favor of a multidirectional expansion of affects. By virtue of their potential impact in the social sphere, timbral performances allow for the trans- fer of politically subversive contents and ideas. In more precise terms: because they are rooted in markers of an affective nature which are not ideologically predeter- mined, an evaluation of the political effectiveness of a timbral performance calls for a reinvention and expansion of the meanings given to the very notion of politics. Accentual performances, on the other hand, are often defined by their performers as sociopolitical interventions connected to the defense of minority cultural identities – in this case, the Galician. Authors in this context tend to commit themselves to narrative linearity, which is seen as a way of strengthening the effectiveness of their communication. Timbral perfomances work to generate an affective delocalization which manages to spread emotions without connecting them to individuals. As will be pointed out, an important aspect of accentual performances is the high standing 112 | María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar.

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