Descrição
In this article we offer a theory for the Portuguese “cantigas ao desafio” (“contest songs”,poetic dueling). We shall approach them on the individual level, insofar as they are a personal creativeact, and on a community level, envisaging them as a sociocultural phenomenon. Its necessary andinterdisciplinary and multifaced approach arises from a poetico-musical specificity that doesn't becomeexhausted in musical and techno-literary components alone. It is a playful and creative game with a lot ofanthropological and sociological ingredients, it is poetry in action. The contest becomes a dialogicalmacro-poem made out of two individual oral poems, intermingled in an alternance of forces, of variabletensions and distensions. The textual dimension is the more visible materiality of an organic processobeying to laws of improvisation in which linguistical-literary elements take part (ars poetica, grammar,rethoric, stylistics, themes, etc.). But it also obeys to extratextual factors with which the contestersinteract very closely (the audience and the technological apparatus involved in some performances formediatic purposes).
