Interferenze tra poesia, musica e disegno: il progetto DAP – Dmitrij Aleksandrovič Prigov

The paper focuses on one of the most famous figures in the Russian cultural scene of the twentieth century, who is regarded as the founder of Moscow Conceptual Art: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940-2007). A poet, writer, painter, graphic designer, author of installations and musical and theatrical performances, Prigov was a versatile and extremely productive artist, who managed to combine a vast range of media and art forms, experimenting with new ways of expression. His entire artistic production was part of a wide project created by the artist himself including different genres and permanently breaking boundaries between forms of art: the life-long artistic project DAP – Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov. After sketching out the characteristics of the project DAP, in this paper I aim to analyze the interaction of different artistic strategies in Prigov’s oeuvre, especially focusing on musical performances which lie at the interface between poetry, song and music. The starting point of many musical performances is the so-called Azbuka (‘Alphabet’), one of the most characteristic genres Dmitry Aleksandrovich experimented with: each of the thirty-three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet spells out a word or a phrase introducing either a sound or a situation. Far from any pedagogical approach, he created his alphabets choosing words and letters not because of their meaning but for their particular sound and acoustic effect: words and music combined in a unique performance.