Journal articles on the topic 'Rhapsodic Theatre'

Amateur theatre circles play an important role in promoting the ideas contained in Karol Wojtyła’s dramas. Our God’s Brother and In front of the Jeweller’s Shop, as well as various poetic works based on Wojtyła’s poetry, have permanently entered the repertoire of smaller theatre groups. Some of these, such as “Droga” from Poznań, “Teatr Karola” from Gliwice or “Hagiograf” from Cracow, subordinate their existence and actions to the goal of promoting the thoughts and works of the Polish Ppope. The variety of forms, from rhapsodic performances to musicals, means that the ideas that John Paul II left in his writings can still find new recipients today.

Karol Wojtyła’s decision to start Polish Philology at the Jagiellonian University after graduating from the State Marcin Wadowita Secondary School was no surprise to those who knew him in Wadowice. His theatrical interests and talents, mainly acting and directing, were widely known. He helped found a high school theatrical group, acted in the Amateur Universal Theatre run by Mieczysław Kotlarczyk, and on the stage of the Catholic House. His mentor in the field of the theatre was Mieczysław Kotlarczyk. As a secondary school student, Wojtyła had already started writing poetry, and possibly his Beskid Ballads had already been created. He wanted to become an actor, but also developed as a writer. Cracow, with its creative environment and student peers, supported his theatrical and literature endeavours. Besides his university studies, he also developed his acting skills in the Studio 39 theatre group. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Studio 39 members continued their underground activities. After Mieczysław Kotlarczyk arrived in Cracow in 1941, the Studio was transformed into the Rhapsodic Theatre. Wojtyła participated in all 7 premiere performances. With his talent and acting capabilities, together with his deep theatrical knowledge, he was a rising hope for his underground companions in the field of acting. His skills were appreciated by such famous actors as Juliusz Osterwa. Osterwa, the chief Polish actor of those times, stated “We seem to have an extraordinary actor” after Juliusz Słowacki’s Król-Duch was performed with Wojtyła starring. He intended to employ Wojtyła after the war. However, the time to make definitive choices finally arrived and Karol Wojtyła entered the Higher Seminary for Priests in 1942. His rhapsodic experience and literary achievements were to be the measurement of his charismatic call to millions of followers and believers as the future Pope.

Abstract With the Lazarillo published anonymously in Spain in the 16th century, the romantic adventure changed paradigm and emancipated itself from the novels of chivalry. For Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, this picaresque novel brings a new voice to the theatre and modern drama that will evolve into a fundamental novelisation that will take off from 1880. This text was for a long time attributed to the humanist Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco and the list of suspects is long akin to this “rhapsodic impulse” those multiple voices that each give a different interpretation to the same text, and that Jean-Pierre Sarrazac exhibits in his book Poétique du drame moderne, de Ibsen à Jean-Marie Koltès (2012). In this investigation of the Lazarillo, the modern drama, from the death of Hurtado in Madrid in 1575, will explore in substance and form the paradoxical question of drama in opening the doors of perception to fictional characters who are also gifted with life, if not our life, in a world where the true and the false mix while the opposing forces carry humanity towards a destiny worthy of Orwell’s 1984, but in the echo of the drama, the voice of the rhapsodes continues to resonate.

In the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf's production of Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, Jess Barbagallo plays the curiously named Eesogay Yougayman, bedecked in a flowing black coat, a wig fit for Ziggy Stardust, and a badgerlike streak of black makeup across her face. The live music falls somewhere between the rhythmic, repetitive structures of kabuki and the more chaotic yet just as percussive style of punk rock, allowing Yougayman (implied to be a traditionally male character) to strut and plunge with violent swagger. She stalks the stage and falls to her knees before the object of her affection, Otane, played by Heidi Shreck, who wears a blood-red kimono and combat boots. Yougayman stares lasciviously into the audience, describing how she abandoned her studies as a samurai to see Otane: “My sickness was a ruse and yet not entirely so, for I was suffering from the malady called love. And you were the cause, Otane!” An exaggerated, almost parodic struggle ensues, in which Otane is caught by Yougayman, whose tongue wags in rhapsodic anticipation of the sexual conquest she is about to force upon Otane as the music and guttural “huhs” from the musicians heighten to a rough, almost unbearable climax.

This article discusses John Paul II’s speech at Victory Square in Warsaw on 2 June 1979, during the Pope’s first pilgrimage to Poland. The subject of the research is the question of whether the Pope, when presenting his homily, used his experience and skills gained in Mieczysław Kotlarczyk’s Rhapsody Theatre and whether he was a rhapsodian himself. The first part of the article describes the Rhapsody Theatre’s ideological assumptions, while the second presents the way the homily by Pope John Paul II was delivered, and, finally, the third part shows which parts of the papal speech coincided with Kotlarczyk’s artistic programme. Finding these similarities allows us to say that John Paul II was indeed a rhapsodian, i.e. a minister of the word.

It is as good a division of the world as any other to observe that there are and have been societies with theatre and others without theatre. And that in societies that know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event, this has always met with reticence, anathema, major or minor excommunications, as well as enthusiasm. More specifically, next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day!

Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise, first published in French in 1990, occupies a unique spot in Alain Badiou's oeuvre. Part theory and part theatre, or at least prototheatre, it certainly can be read alongside other books from the same period, especially Handbook of Inaesthetics and Metapolitics, devoted respectively to the truth procedures of art and politics that function as two of the four conditions of philosophy according to Badiou. Of the other two conditions, mathematics is treated in Number and Numbers and Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, whereas love is the only truth procedure not to receive a book-length investigation. Even in the case of Badiou's treatment of love, a text such as “The Scene of the Two” resonates with the present text due to the importance given to the production of a “scene” for the amorous couple. In addition to opening up a fascinating dialogue with this theoretical treatment of the four conditions of philosophy, Rhapsody for the Theatre also and at the same time can serve as the ideal accompanying piece for Badiou's work as a playwright, most notably the Ahmed tetralogy that comprises Ahmed le subtil, Ahmed philosophe, Ahmed se fâche, and Les Citrouilles and that was staged in a quick creative sequence starting just four years after Rhapsody for the Theatre was published. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of this treatise is the way in which it moves between philosophy and theatre to the point of opening up a space of indiscernibility between the two.

Within the twenty-year period that coincides with the first twenty years of the Glej Theatre, the essay concentrates on the formation and transformations of non-hierarchical theatre communities, or, in the words of one of its founders, Dušan Jovanović, theatrical tribes. Using historical and present-day examples, the author will try to map the specific devised theatrical procedures producing what Badiou names “a generic vacillation”: “Theatre turns every representation, every actor’s gesture, into a generic vacillation so as to put differences to the test without any supporting base. The spectator must decide whether to expose himself to this void, whether to share in the infinite procedure. He is summoned, not to experience pleasure (which arrives perhaps ‘on top of everything’, as Aristotle says) but to think” (Rhapsody, 124).The essay strives to answer the following questions: How did the Slovenian experimental and non-institutional performing arts scene (as a reaction to the hierarchical structure of repertory theatres) create different non-hierarchical modes in relation to creating the performances, the theatre’s artistic direction and forming temporary communities with emancipated audiences? To which models did this scene turn – then and today – to develop its own logic of devised and collaborative theatrical tactics? And lately: To what extent have those different artistic collaborative tribes changed the theatrical landscape in Slovenia, Yugoslavia and elsewhere?

A chapter from Alain Badiou’s dialogic book (with Nicolas Truong) on the condition of theatre today, its merging borders with other arts and media and its challenged perspectives tomorrow. This philosophic pamphlet is based on a public talk given by the famous philosopher at the Avignon Theatre Festival. Translated in Bulagrian by prof. Lidia Denkova.

In Rhapsody for the Theatre, Badiou propped the notion of the ethics of play against a theory of the subject that had yet to be fully deployed. His reflection remains tentative and he simply suggests �that the actor could very well show a subject without substance,� that �always between-two,� [the ethics of play] operates in the pure present of the spectacle, and the public [�] gains access to this present only in the aftermath of a thought,� and ultimately that �the ethics of play is that of an escape� (Badiou 2008, 216, 221). There is a delay at work in the ethics of play, an in-between. By looking at Nature Theater of Oklahoma�s Life and Times and Gob Squad�s Gob Squad�s Kitchen (You never Had It So Good), this article proposes to examine how an ethics of play could be materially deployed in these earpiece performances through the delay, albeit minimal, the in-between text or instruction and their actualisation on stage.

In this article Dmitry Trubotchkin focuses on Homer's Iliad as directed by Stathis Livathinos and premiered in Athens on 4 July 2013 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Summer Festival – as far as is known, the first production of the complete Iliad in world theatre. It was performed by fifteen actors, each of whom played several roles and also acted the role of the ancient rhapsode, or narrator of epics. Livathinos's Iliad restored the original understanding of ‘epic theatre’, which differs from what is usually meant by this term in the light of Brechtian theory and practice with its didactic and distancing emphases. In the Greek performance, the transformation of an actor from one role to another and from acting to narration is constant, and the voice of Homer as a ‘collective author’ can be heard through all these transformations. Livathinos's Iliad may well be a landmark, indicating a new way of presenting epics on the stage. Dmitry Trubotchkin is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Russian University of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Moscow State University. He heads the Department of Ancient and Medieval Art at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow. His publications include ‘All is Well, the Old Man is Still Dancing’: Roman Palliata in Action (2005), Ancient Literature and Dramaturgy (2010), and Rimas Tuminas: the Moscow Productions (forthcoming).

In this work ‘Karol Wojtyła / Jan Paweł II and religious thoughts of Zygmunt Krasiński in his early epistolography’, the Authoress concentrates her research on the figure of young Karol Wojtyla and on his originated in Wadowice period of his life fascination with Polish romantic literature. Young Karol is not only an actor, but a co-director and co-creator of spectacles presented to the public. Wojtyla’s experiences gained in the Rhapsodic Theater and during his studies of Polish literature at the University convince him that the spoken word has a prophetic, missionary character, leading to a transformation both in spiritual and intellectual spheres. Zygmunt Krasiński in his early epistolography addresses essential aesthetic-religious problems which in future become the idea of national messianism. Jan Paweł II in his papal teaching forcefully explores the ideas of Polish romanticism adding the theological thought to the aesthetic content.

This article is concerned with the fragmentary nature of Juliusz Słowacki’s poem “Król‑Duch”, its mystical‑Christian dimension and the impact it had on Karol Wojtyła. Openness to infinity and perpetuality of literature is made clear by referring to Friedrich Schlegel and his idea on the endlessness of romantic poetry, as well as to Roland Barthes, who draws attention to the text as a fabric creating a “wonderful image”. “Król‑Duch”, being a work that requires a patient and soulful reader, ready to travel through the labyrinth, is noticed by Karol Wojtyla, who recognizes the poem as a perfect Christian epic. Participation in the Rhapsodic Theater and the change that occurred in the thought of the later pope indicate a deep understanding of the truths hidden in the work. It also proves that a new way of reading – a long conversation with the text, can lead to repentance. The article attempts to prove that literary mysticism, the experience of the relationship of the “I” with God, as well as spiritual activity bring the work of the romantic poet closer to the poetry of Karol Wojtyła, while making John Paul II the next “King‑Spirit”, the Spirit that orients the nation towards the highest levels of Divine Love.

The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first century is a stock theme both in ancient and in modern literary criticism. While previous studies on the epic recital emphasize its negative effects, or aim at its reconstruction as social reality, I focus on its conflicting representations by the ancients themselves and the lessons that we can learn from them. The voices of critics and defenders reveal anxieties about who controls the prestigious high genre of epic and about the construction of gender and social status through epic's public performance. Critics of the recitatio such as Horace, Persius, Petronius and Juvenal represent it as an informal and popular event that panders to public taste and incurs infamy. These critics charge that the epic recital has an effeminizing effect both on the recitator and on his audience, a charge traditionally advanced against orators and actors. Because the epic recital in Rome lacks a performative context similar to the rhapsodic performances in Greece, its public image mirrors that of other public performances (the theater, the public speech and the public lecture). The main point of divergence is the presence of the book, the symbol of permanent fame, which casts upon the recital the shadow of an evanescent entertainment. Defenders (Statius and Suetonius) see the recital as instrumental to the maintenance of literature's value in society. This means that well into the first century there were those who felt nostalgia for the epic recital as a bulwark of male aristocratic values and who wanted to reclaim its prestige. Both Statius as a poet, who performed regularly at Domitian's court, and Suetonius, who acted as Hadrian's ab epistulis some twenty years after Statius' death, defend the waning reputation of the contemporary epic recital in an effort to reclaim it as a prestigious component of imperial literary culture. While critics unanimously negate the recital's role in the achievement of poetic fame in favor of the book, Suetonius chooses anecdotal evidence about the early performances by grammarians grammarians that show the important role of the recital in forging poetic fame. The emperor and the members of the new aristocracy whom Statius explicitly names as the target audience of his epic recitals have a stake in reclaiming for imperial culture an institution that went back to the second century B.C.E. and carried the prestige of an aristocratic event.

The beautiful parable of Pythagoras, handed down by Cicero (Tusculanae Disputationes, V, 3), about the Greek Games as a metaphor of human life, is well-known. In this parable, the great philosopher and mathematician presents three groups of people who come to the Games (figuratively, the World Games, the Theatre of Life): these are athletes – applying for fame and a wreath of victory, viewers – motivated by an impartial desire to watch the competitions and merchants – putting up stalls for the sale of goods and profit. The featured groups serve Pythagoras as allegories of social roles and human aspirations for values: prestigious and elite (athletes), cognitive and exploratory (spectators) as well as mercantile and consumer (merchants). This parabola essentially serves to expose a sense of philosophy, love wisdom, based on pure and autotelic cognitive curiosity (viewers represent this attitude). The fact that Pythagoras uses the image of the Games here is not accidental, since Greek philosophers were greatly interested in athletics (Pythagoras was friends with the famous wrestler Milo of Croton). Greek athletes were, in fact, spectacular and faithful representatives of their culture, marked by strong individualism flourishing in the tensions between the two oppositional poles: time (fame) and ajdos (shame). The sources of the ancient Hellenic “culture of glory and shame” are rooted in the heroic myths of Homer’s rhapsode. These myths were later subjected to rational sublimation in the ethical and anthropological considerations of philosophers (Pythagoras made a brilliant and, at the same time, raw contribution to them). They also became an archetypal element of the pan-Hellenic agonist ethos and the local athletic and artistic games. Pierre de Coubertin, nostalgically fixated on noble myth and heroic ethos, transferred his senses and values to the ideology of neo-Olympism, desiring the modern Olympic movement be not only a government of bodies, but also a lesson of character, a government of souls. He initiated not only modern Olympiads, but also the theoretical hermeneutics of sport, which is still doing well and developing in the form of, among others, Olympic education, philosophy and ethics of sport, history of sport and physical education, sociology of physical culture. Here is today’s participation in the Games of these Pythagorean spectators – theoreticians (Greek theoria, a panorama, observation), researchers, scientists who develop an ideological and axio-normative basis of sports practices. Despite didactic efforts, effective crystallization and articulation of principles and ideological imperatives by Coubertin and his followers, sport today seems to be losing its archetypal eidos. According to numerous diagnoses, this is the result of the faster appropriation of athletic spaces by heterogeneous economic influences (Pythagorean traders!), – those political, media- and marketing-related. Pure sports values, such as competition, perfectionism, pageantry, bodily and psychological power of man are today subjected to instrumentalisation processes and are used for non-sporting purposes. Critics practicing jeremiads on the condition of modern sport and the decline in the value of its ethos even go as far as to theorise that “sport no longer exists” because it gave the field to foreign dictates. Therefore, sport may appear as a “contemporary slave market”, “marketplace of vanity and greed”, “post-human laboratory”, “pitch of imperial skirmishes of world political powers”. All these affairs actually concern the condition of not only sport, but also the state of society and culture in general. Sport, due to its spectacular presence in the global world, is particularly predisposed to focus dominant trends, influences and interests within it. Sport is not more immoral than the world of which it is a part. For these reasons, it is so eagerly analysed by historians, sociologists and cultural scholars, for whom it is a heuristic model for studying the dynamics of cultural changes. Sport is a mirror focusing the whole of social life and historical processes occurring within the human world, i.e. culture. Approaching this from a hermeneutic understanding and interpreting reflection towards sport, we can (as Hans-Georg Gadamer taught) fuse horizons of historical tradition and contexts that are the result of problems, crises and dilemmas of our time. A meaningful interpretation of these collisions regards extracting vital meaning for current life, as well as increasing the level of human self-knowledge and responsibility. Sport, in its rich historical tradition, in the solstices, barriers, temptations and challenges of present day, requires such a complex understanding. In the introduction to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel expressed an unusual and invariably current formula: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”. Wisdom is born at dusk, it is the knowledge of the times that passes by in the eyes of the people who create it. Only at the end of events can one clearly and unambiguously draw (against the symbolism of dusk) explanations of their important moments, including the symptoms and causes of crises. There is no wisdom without a historical sense and reflection on the transformation of culture. Wilhelm Dilthey, the creator of philosophical hermeneutics, extended the self-knowledge of man to the knowledge of the vast history of the past, stating that only history tells man who he really is. We can use these directives to study the evolution of sport, both in its historical forms of flourishing and decadence, as well as in the institutions, biographies of sports champions, the fate of ideas and values deposited in it. Sport studied in such a manner has the power of anthropological recognition, it can tell a man who he himself is. Despite the symptoms of crisis, sport is still important for a person, arousing his enthusiasm, giving birth to new masters who become admired models and personal authorities. A man defends sport, fair play and the values that fund his ethos, because he cares about sport, considering it an expression and fulfilment of the rudiments of his own existence. The collection of articles presented in this volume of Studies in Sport Humanities can be viewed as a small fragment of the wider fresco of sport culture in its historical changes and present shapes. Two historical texts relate to the development of sport in the Polish interwar period, on the example of the individual career of the Polish footballer Ernest Wilimowski and institutional management of sports disciplines in Volhynia, an extremely ethnically and culturally diverse province at the time. The other two articles present contemporary discussions on sports tourism (casus of the Philippines) and the religious dimension of sport. We invite you to read, and through these texts to, continue the debate on the historical and current great and smaller matters of sport.

El compromiso del teatro con la realidad puede abordarse de múltiples maneras. Nos proponemos analizar dos propuestas dramatúrgicas radicalmente distintas —antitéticas— alrededor del tema de la hambruna y los niños soldados en África, y constatar las formas que en ellas adopta la pulsión rapsódica propia del drama contemporáneo. Après moi, le déluge, de Lluïsa Cunillé, opta por personajes europeos y por la palabra como catalizadora de la acción, mientras que Angélica Liddell, en Y como no se pudrió…: Blancanieves, presenta a sus personajes ya inmersos en la barbarie.The theatre commitment with reality can be carried out in many ways. We set out to analyze two radically different —antithetical— proposals about the subject of famine and soldier children in Africa, and to state the forms that rhapsodic impulse, typical of contemporary drama, adopt in them. Après moi, le déluge, by Lluïsa Cunillé, opts for European characters and the word as catalyst of action, while in Y como no se pudrió…: Blancanieves, by Angélica Liddell, the characters are already immersed in the barbarism.

Nowadays, the importance of social media in the various sectors of our society is unquestionable. Furthermore, the investment that the cinematographic industry has been making in the use of new digital platforms that promote communication with the public is also undeniable. The trend is the cinema converge with the Internet, so it is imperative that the cinematographic industry creates an online content production system continuously and updated before, during and after the film’s debut in theatres. This empirical study aims to highlight the effects of the awarding of the best film and best actor in the 76th Golden Globe Award for the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. In this way, it was analysed the engagement of web users with the Facebook page before and after the attribution of the prizes to the film object of this analysis. The results show that as we move further from the release date of the movie, there will be a trend towards more “likes”, but less “shares” and “comments” by users that follows the movie page. Nevertheless, this trend changed in order to the Bohemian Rhapsody victory in the Golden Globes. Therefore, it is concluded that the awarding of premiums to the films modifies the engagement of the users in that pages of social media.

The Belgian theatre-dance company Ultima Vez – founded by the director and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus – presented Booty Looting in 2012, at the Venice Biennale Danza. On the stage, a complex and apparently disordered narrative rhapsody, brings into play complementary diegetic coefficients: while a story straddles the real and the imaginary, the dancers become consumed actors, the actors dance and live music fills the empty spaces. But the real beating heart of the show is the photographer, who is entrusted with the delicate task of deciphering the feverish dynamism of the scene to move the public's attention elsewhere, as if to give them a relaxing break from the chaos. The photographic image, taken and reported in real time on the screen at the bottom of the stage, freezes some salient moments of that convulsive movement, almost to break it down anatomically into parts of a 'muybridgian' conception. The photographer, always active during the representation, is an integral part of the story, becoming a performer himself so that his intervention determines the dramaturgical development of the plot. The visual quality of the scene is strongly enhanced by live photographic images, which are often attributable to known visual models. Booty looting literally means stealing what has already been the object of theft, exactly as it happens in the art world, according to the perspective of Vandekeybus. Photography is seen here as an instrument that on the one hand makes it useful to prove the reality of facts, but at the same time declares its ability to lie, to deform memory, to create false memories, to become misleading echoes of experiences actually lived. Between truth and deceit, the photographic image plunders the world and gives us the feeling of being able to know and know it in depth - as Susan Sontag teaches - but it is only a distorted memory that confuses and falsifies the real.

This volume is a surprise-gift offered by the informal research and debate group coordinated by Professor Zoltán Rostás, dedicated to Sanda Golopenția. A prestigious researcher, she is the daughter of the well-known sociologist Anton Golopenția, member of the Bucharest Sociological School. The volume brings together fifty-one studies, pieces of research, archive notes, essays, letters, prose, poems, which the editors have gathered from valued members of the global academic community, with whom Sanda Golopenția has exchanged messages. In this comment I have chosen to focus on several of the diverse interests and passions of Sanda Golopenția (S.G.). She brought significant contributions to linguistics, ethnography, semiotics, theater, sociology, and social history, among others. Among these, I will discuss selected aspects that are highly relevant to the Sociological School of Bucharest and to the activity of her parents, Anton Golopenția and Ștefania Cristescu- Golopenția, as also highlighted by the study authors. This short list includes: 1) A comprehensive profile of Sanda Golopenția’s life and career, which sheds light on the history of the Bucharest Sociological School; 2) “The Epistolary Rhapsody” – a benchmark achievement within the frame of modern historiography; 3) The reconstruction of a major chapter in the history of sociology, serving as a window towards a “total editorial fact”; 4) The project of interventionist sociology, comprised in the student campaigns of the Social Service in Romanian villages, aiming for the emancipation of the peasantry, which was also a strategic component in the national mass-media of that time; 5) Sanda Golopenția’s personality, serving as an inspirational model for young and aspiring intellectuals.

Introduction Artist: June 2 at 11.26pm:‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ - Raymond Williams. (Singaporean Artists’ public Facebook Post) Can the critical arts exist without ‘place’?There is an ongoing debate on ‘place’ and where it begins and ends; on the ways that cities exist in both material and immaterial forms, and thereby, how to locate and understand place as an anchoring point amidst global flows (Massey; Merrifield). This debate extends to the global art- scape, as traditional conceptions of art and art-making attached to place require re-thinking in a paradigm where digital and immaterial networks, symbols and forums both complement and complicate the role that place has traditionally played (Luger, “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?”). The digital art-scape has allowed for art-led provocations, transformations and disturbances to traditional institutions and gatekeepers (see Hartley’s “ Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies” concept of ‘gatekeeper’) of the art world, which often served as elite checkpoints and way-stations to artistic prominence. Still, contradictory and paradoxical questions emerge, since art cannot be divorced of place entirely, and ‘place’ often features as a topic, subject, or site of critical expression for art regardless of material or immaterial form. Critical art is at once place-bound and place-less; anchored to sites even as it transcends them completely.This paper will explore the dualistic tension – and somewhat contradictory relationship – between physical and digital artistic space through the case study of authoritarian Singapore, by focusing on a few examples of art-activists and the way that they have used and manipulated both physical and digital spaces for art-making. These examples draw upon research which took place in Singapore from 2012-2014 and which involved interviews with, and observation of, a selected sample (30) of art-activists (or “artivists”, to use Krischer’s definition). Findings point to a highly co-dependent relationship between physical and digital art places where both offer unique spaces of possibility and limitations. Therefore, place remains essential in art-making, even as digital avenues expand and amplify what critical art-practice can accomplish.Singapore’s Place-Bound and Place-Less Critical Art-Scape The arts in Singapore have a complicated, and often tense relationship with places such as the theatre, the gallery, and the public square. Though there has been a recent push (in the form of funding to arts groups and physical arts infrastructure) to make Singapore more of an arts and cultural destination (see Luger “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City”), the Singaporean arts-scape remains bound by restrictions and limitations, and varying degrees of de facto (and de jure) censorship and self-policing. This has opened up spaces for critical art, albeit in sometimes creative and surprising forms. As explained to me by a Singaporean playwright,So they’re [the state] making venues, as well as festival organizers, as well as theatre companies, to …self-police, or self-censor. But for us on the ground, we use that as a way to focus on what we still want to say, and be creative about it, so that we circumvent the [state], with the intention of doing what we want to do. (Research interview, Singaporean playwright)Use of cyber-spaces is one way that artists circumvent repressive state structures. Restrictions on the use of place enliven cyberspace with an emancipatory and potentially transformative potential for the critical arts. Cyber-Singapore has a vocal art-activist network and has allowed some artists (such as the “Sticker Lady”) to gain wide national and even international followings. However, digital space cannot exist without physical place; indeed, the two exist, simultaneously, forming and re-forming each other. The arts cannot ‘happen’ online without a corresponding physical space for incubation, for practice, for human networking.It is important to note that in Singapore, art-led activism (or ‘artivism’) and traditional activism are closely related, and research indicated that activist networks often overlap with the art world. While this may be the case in many places, Singapore’s small geography and the relatively wide-berth given to the arts (as opposed to political activism) make these relationships especially strong. Therefore, many arts-spaces (theatres, galleries, studios) function as activist spaces; and non-art spaces such as public squares and university campuses often host art events and displays. Likewise, many of the artists that I interviewed are either directly, or indirectly, involved in more traditional activism as well.Singapore is an island-nation-city-state with a carefully planned urban fabric, the vast majority of which is state-owned (at least 80 % - resulting from large-scale land transfers from the British in the years surrounding Singapore’s independence in 1965). Though it has a Westminster-style parliamentary system (another colonial vestige), a single ruling party has commanded power for 50 years (the People’s Action Party, or PAP). Despite free elections and a liberal approach toward business, foreign investment and multiculturalism, Singapore retains a labyrinthine geography of government control over free expression, dictated through agencies such as the Censorship Review Committee (CRC); the Media Development Authority (MDA), and the National Arts Council (NAC) which work together in a confusing grid of checks and balances. This has presented a paradoxical and often contradictory approach to the arts and culture in which gradual liberalisations of everything from gay nightlife to university discourse have come hand-in-hand with continued restrictions on political activism and ‘taboo’ artistic / cultural themes. These ‘out of bounds’ themes (see Yue) include perceived threats to Singapore’s racial, religious, or political harmony – a grey area that is often at the discretion of particular government bureaucrats and administrators.Still, the Singaporean arts place (take the theatre, for example) has assumed a special role as a focal point for not only various types of visual and performance art, but also unrelated (or tangentially-related) activist causes as well. I asked a theatre director of a prominent alternative theatre where, in Singapore’s authoritarian urban fabric, there were opportunities for provocation? He stressed the theatres’ essential role in providing a physical platform for visual tensions and disturbance:You know, and on any given evening, you’ll see some punks or skinheads hanging outside there, and they kind of – create this disturbance in this neighbourhood, where, you know a passer-by is walking to his posh building, and then suddenly you know, there’s this bunch of boys with mohawks, you know, just standing there – and they are friendly! There’s nothing antagonistic or threatening, whatever. So, you know, that’s the kind of tension that we actually love to kind of generate!… That kind of surprise, that kind of, ‘oh, oh yes!’ we see this nice, expensive restaurant, this nice white building, and then these rough edges. And – that is where uh, those points where – where factions, where the rough edges meet –are where dialogue occurs. (Theatre Director, Singapore)That is not to say that the theatre comes without limits and caveats. It is financially precarious, as the Anglo-American model of corporate funding for the arts is not yet well-established in Singapore; interviews revealed that even much of the philanthropic donating to arts organizations comes from Singapore’s prominent political families and therefore the task of disentangling state interests from non-ideological arts patronage becomes difficult. With state - funding come problems with “taboo” subjects, as exemplified by the occasional banned-play or the constant threat of budget cuts or closure altogether: a carrot and stick approach by the state that allows arts organizations room to operate as long as the art produced does not disturb or provoke (too) much.Liew and Pang suggest that in Singapore, cyberspace has allowed a scale, a type of debate and a particularly cross-cutting conversation to take place: in a context where there are peculiar restrictions on the use and occupation of the built environment. They [ibid] found an emerging vocal, digital artistic grassroots that increasingly challenges the City-State’s dominant narratives: my empirical research therefore expands upon, and explores further, the possibility that Singapore’s cyber-spaces are both complementary to, and in some ways, more important than its material places in terms of providing spaces for political encounters.I conducted ‘netnography’ (see Kozinets) across Singapore’s web-scape and found that the online realm may be the ‘… primary site for discursive public activity in general and politics in particular’ (Mitchell, 122); a place where ‘everybody is coming together’ (Merrifield, 18). Without fear of state censorship, artists, activists and art-activists are not bound by the (same) set of restrictions that they might be if operating in a theatre, or certainly in a public place such as a park or square. Planetary cyber-Singapore exists inside and outside the City-State; it can be accessed remotely, and can connect with a far wider audience than a play performed in a small black box theatre.A number of blogs and satirical sites – including TheOnlineCitizen.sg, TheYawningBread.sg, and Demon-Cratic Singapore, openly criticize government policy in ways rarely heard in-situ or in even casual conversation on the street. Additionally, most activist causes and coalitions have digital versions where information is spread and support is gathered, spanning a range of issues. As is the case in material sites of activism in Singapore, artists frequently emerge as the loudest, most vocal, and most inter-disciplinary digital activists, helping to spearhead and cobble together cultural-activist coalitions and alliances. One example of this is the contrast between the place bound “Pink Dot” LGBTQ event (limited to the amount of people that can fit in Hong Lim Park, a central square) and its Facebook equivalent, We are Pink Dot public ‘group’. Pink Dot occurs each June in Singapore and involves around 10,000 people. The Internet’s representations of Pink Dot, however, have reached millions: Pink Dot has been featured in digital (and print) editions of major global newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. While not explicitly an art event, Pink Dot is artistic in nature as it uses pink ‘dots’ to side-step the official designation of being an LGBTQ pride event – which would not be sanctioned by the authorities (Gay Pride has not been allowed to take place in Singapore).The street artist Samantha Lo – also known as “Sticker Lady” – was jailed for her satirical stickers that she placed in various locations around Singapore. Unable to freely practice her art on city streets, she has become a sort of local artist - Internet celebrity, with her own Facebook Group called Free Sticker Lady (with over 1,000 members as of April, 2016). Through her Facebook group, Lo has been able to voice opinions that would be difficult – or even prohibited – with a loudspeaker on the street, or expressed through street art. As an open lesbian, she has also been active (and vocal) in the “Pink Dot” events. Her speech at “Pink Dot” was heard by the few-thousand in attendance at the time; her Facebook post (public without privacy settings) is available to the entire world:I'll be speaking during a small segment at Pink Dot tomorrow. Though only two minutes long, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my speech and finding myself at a position where there's just so much to say. All my life, I've had to work twice as hard to prove myself, to be taken seriously. At 18, I made a conscious decision to cave in to societal pressures to conform after countless warnings of how I wouldn't be able to get a job, get married, etc. I grew my hair out, dressed differently, but was never truly comfortable with the person I became. That change was a choice, but I wasn't happy.Since then, I learnt that happiness wasn't a given, I had to work for it, for the ability to be comfortable in my own skin, to do what I love and to make something out of myself. (Artists’ Facebook Post)Yet, without the city street, Lo would not have gained her notoriety; without use of the park, Pink Dot would not have a Facebook presence or the ability to gather international press. The fact that Singaporean theatre exists at all as an important instigator of visual and performative tension demonstrates the significance of its physical address. Physical art places provide a crucial period of incubation – practice and becoming – that cannot really be replicated online. This includes schools and performance space but also in Singapore’s context, the ‘arts-housing’ that is provided by the government to small-scale, up-and-coming artists through a competitive grant process. Artists can receive gallery, performance or rehearsal space for a set amount of time on a rotating basis. Even with authoritarian restrictions, these spaces have been crucial for arts development:There’s a short-term [subsidised] residency studio …for up to 12 months. And so that –allows for a rotating group of artists to come with an idea in mind, use it for whatever- we’ve had artists who were preparing for a major show, and say ‘my studio space, my existing studio space is a bit too tiny, because I’m prepping for this show, I need a larger studio for 3 months. (Arts Administrator, Singapore)Critical and provocative art, limited and restricted by place, is thus still intrinsically bound to it. Indeed, the restrictions on artistic place allow cyber-art to flourish; cyber-art can only flourish with a strong place- based anchor. Far from supplanting place-based art, the digital art-scape forms a complement; digital and place-based art forms combine to form new hybridities in which local context and global forces write and re-write each other in a series of place and ‘placeless’ negotiations. Conclusion The examples that have been presented in this paper paint a picture of a complex landscape where specific urban sites are crucial anchoring nodes in a critical art ecosystem, but much artistic disturbance actually occurs online and in immaterial forms. This may hint at the possibility that globally, urban sites themselves are no longer sufficient for critical art to flourish and reach its full potential, especially as such sites have increasingly fallen prey to austerity policies, increasingly corporate and / or philanthropic programming and curation, and the comparatively wider reach and ease of access that digital spaces offer.Electronic or digital space – ranging from e-mail to social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook and many others) has opened a new frontier in which, “… material public spaces in the city are superseded by the fora of television, radio talk shows and computer bulletin boards” (Mitchell. 122). The possibility now emerges whether digital space may be even more crucial than material public spaces in terms of emancipatory or critical potential– especially in authoritarian contexts where public space / place comes with particular limits and restrictions on assembling, performance, and critical expression. These contexts range from Taksim Square, Istanbul to Tiananmen Square, Beijing – but indeed, traditional public place has been increasingly privatized and securitized across the Western-liberal world as well. Where art occurs in place it is often stripped of its critical potential or political messages, sanctioned or sponsored by corporate groups or sanitized by public sector authorities (Schuilenburg, 277).The Singapore case may be especially stark due to Singapore’s small size (and corresponding lack of visible public ‘places’); authoritarian restrictions and correspondingly (relatively) un-policed and un-censored cyberspace. But it is fair to say that at a time when Youtube creates instant celebrities and Facebook likes or Instagram followers indicate fame and (potential) fortune – it is time to re-think and re-conceptualise the relationship between place, art, and the place-based institutions (such as grant-funding bodies or philanthropic organizations, galleries, critics or dealers) that have often served as “gatekeepers” to the art-scape. This invites challenges to the way these agents operate and the decision making process of policy-makers in the arts and cultural realm.Mitchell (124) reminded that there has “never been a revolution conducted exclusively in electronic space; at least not yet.” But that was 20 years ago. Singapore may offer a glimpse, however, of what such a revolution might look like. This revolution is neither completely place bound nor completely digital; it is one in which the material and immaterial interplay and overlap in post-modern complexity. Each platform plays a role, and understanding the way that art operates both in place and in “placeless” forms is crucial in understanding where key transformations take place in both the production of critical art and the production of urban space.What Hartley (“The Politics of Pictures”) called the “space of citizenry” is not necessarily confined to a building, the city street or a public square (or even private spaces such as the home, the car, the office). Sharon Zukin likewise suggested that ultimately, a negotiation of a city’s digital sphere is crucial for current-day urban research, arguing that:Though I do not think that online communities have replaced face to face interaction, I do think it is important to understand the way web-based media contribute to our urban imaginary. The interactive nature of the dialogue, how each post feeds on the preceding ones and elicits more, these are expressions of both difference and consensus, and they represent partial steps toward an open public sphere. (27)Traditional gatekeepers such as the theatre director, the museum curator and the state or philanthropic arts funding body have not disappeared, though they must adapt to the new cyber-reality as artists have new avenues around these traditional checkpoints. Accordingly – “old” problems such as de-jure and de-facto censorship reappear in the cyber art-scape as well: take the example of the Singaporean satirical bloggers that have been sued by the government in 2013-2016 (such as the socio-political bloggers and satirists Roy Ngerng and Alex Au). No web-space is truly open.A further complication may be the corporate nature of sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter: far from truly democratic platforms or “agoras” in the traditional sense, these are for-profit (massive) corporations – which a small theatre is not. Singapore’s place based authoritarianism may be multiplied in the corporate authoritarianism or “CEO activism” of tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, who allow for diverse use of digital platforms and encourage open expression and unfettered communication – as long as it is on their terms, within company policies that are not always transparent.Perhaps the questions then really are not where ‘art’ begins and ends, or where a place starts or stops – but rather where authoritarianism, state and corporate power begin and end in the hyper-connected global cyber-scape? And, if these power structures are now stretched across space and time as Marxist theorists such as Massey or Merrifield claimed, then what is the future for critical art and its relationship to ‘place’?Despite these unanswered questions and invitations for further exploration, the Singapore case may hint at what this emerging geography of place and ‘placeless’ art resembles and how such a new world may evolve moving forward. ReferencesHartley, John. The Politics of Pictures: the Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media. Perth: Psychology Press, 1992.———. Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Kozinets, Robert. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. New York: Sage, 2010. Krischer, Oliver. “Lateral Thinking: Artivist Networks in East Asia.” ArtAsia Pacific 77 (2012): 96-110. Liew, Kai Khiun. and Natalie Pang. “Neoliberal Visions, Post Capitalist Memories: Heritage Politics and the Counter-Mapping of Singapore’s City-Scape.” Ethnography 16.3 (2015): 331-351.Luger, Jason. “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City: Spaces of Contestation in Singapore.” In T. Oakes and J. Wang, eds., Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2015: 204-218. ———. “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?' Activist Geographies in the City-State.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 20.2 (2016): 186-203. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Merrifield, Andy. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Mitchell, Don. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1 (1996): 108-133. Schuilenburg, Marc. The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Yue, Audrey. “Hawking in the Creative City: Rice Rhapsody, Sexuality and the Cultural Politics of New Asia in Singapore. Feminist Media Studies 7.4 (2007): 365-380. Zukin, Sharon. The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.