“Ma dissidence”: Anna Prucnal’s Art of Song
Abstract
The career of the Polish actress and songstress Anna Prucnal is an example of a transgressive artistic biography torn between countries, cultures, ideologies, styles and media. Piotrowski examines Prucnal’s achievements in popular music in the context of interactions between her artistic identity and her theatre songs, and the subsequent places where she was artistically based (Warsaw, Berlin, Paris). He examines the process of acculturation and narrativisation of Prucnal’s song art through considering places and cultures associated with them, arguing that they not only shaped the identity of the artist, her aesthetics and style, but they underwent “relocations” within those contexts. On the one hand, elements of place and identity in Prucnal’s work create a unique system, open to an “incorrect” reading, woven from different and opposing qualities (aesthetic, performative, ideological etc.). Thanks to that Prucnal’s art – on a scale rarely seen in popular music – is transnational, transgenre and trans-style, and belongs to the transavantgarde of the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand Piotrowski believes that Prucnal’s identity, processual and continuous, redefined in each gesture and for a moment, cannot be reduced, and refers, in various contexts, above all to itself. The paradox and mystery of Prucnal’s art of song rely on the existence of a separate and permanent core: the artist herself and by herself is a “place” – extracted by the voice and a unique expression, this place cannot be confused with anybody or anything else, nor may it be appropriated.
Keywords:
Anna Prucnal, voice, transnationalismReferences
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Authors
Grzegorz Piotrowskikwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
University of Gdańsk Poland
Muzykolog, adiunkt kulturoznawstwa na Uniwersytecie Gdańskim i wykładowca Akademii Muzycznej w Gdańsku. Specjalizuje się w twórczości Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, teorii i praktyce muzyki popularnej oraz jazzu, aktorstwie filmowym, szkle Huty Niemen, sztuce gejowskiej.
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