Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio and Joan Littlewood’s Bubble City Pamphlet: Ludic Sites for a Mobile Fun Palace Programme.

The Fun Palace was an interdisciplinary cultural initiative active in London 1960s set up by the radical theatre producer Joan Littlewood. It critically addressed the question of increase leisure through the provision of ‘total enjoyment’ as a way to activate audiences and induce social growth. In search of support and funding, the Fun Palace programme was crucially realized in the production of its publicity. The paper examines two specific ‘sites of information’ in which the FP idea was constituted and circulated: the Fun Palace broadsheet within Alex Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio in 1964, and Joan Littlewood’s Bubble City pamphlet in 1968. The transferences from content to format and from site to idea qualify the Fun Palace as a radical model of cultural production.