Between 1957 and 1974, a small professional theater company in Washington, D.C. staged ninety Equity (union) productions and ten non-Equity shows, including ten world premieres, four American premieres, thirty Washington premieres, and works by sixty-four writers whose works had not been performed previously in the Washington region. The Washington Theater Club staged new works by several of the era’s leading English-language playwrights. The club also served as a proving ground for actors starting out their careers, including several who would come to dominate the American stage and screen. By the time the club closed, it had played a far more important role in the evolution of American regional theater than its diminutive size might suggest. Theater enthusiasts Hazel and John Wentworth opened the Washington Theater Club during the late 1950s. Hazel and John were hungry for innovative drama of a sort absent in Washington. They established their group to promote fresh dramatic forms, to present new ideas, and to support novice playwrights and their works. They nurtured a slightly bohemian tone, often presenting non-mainstream works. The Wentworths viewed their theater’s mission to rise above artistic achievement to embrace social activism. They sought to present quality productions performed and enjoyed by diverse casts and audiences outside the restrictions of Washington’s racial segregation of the period. From the beginning, the Club promoted Black theater and Black writers and artists. The club’s story also is one highlighting the destructive power of bureaucratic and political petty tutelage. Washington remained under the direct control of the U.S. Congress throughout this period. The commissioners and bureaucrats charged by Congress to run the city remained unaccountable to the city’s residents. In the end, a tax code unfavorable to cultural institutions undermined the club’s survivability. Various courts ruled against the Club, leaving the club with an expensive property tax bill that it could not cover. Bankers foreclosed on their loans. The rise and fall of the Washington Theater Club offers a cautionary tale of what can happen when a community’s fate is left in the hands of those who have little connection to it. This loss of accountability can breed oppression, servility, cruelty, and loathsome in its own way, idiocy.

This article examines art residencies as a format for multifunctional socio-cultural interaction and as a tool for intercultural dialogue, cultural diplomacy, and European integration processes. The author examines the features of the formation and development of art residencies worldwide and in Ukraine, emphasizing their functions in the context of interaction between the state, artistic communities, and businesses. Particular attention is given to the experience of the international Art Circle Residency (Slovenia/Italy, 2025) as a successful model for integrating the cultural, economic, and social potential of a region. The study demonstrates how art residencies contribute to the formation of sustainable development values, strengthen local cultural environments, expand international cultural networks, and support democratic development strategies. The article also analyzes the potential for adapting this experience to Ukraine in the context of post-war recovery, particularly in terms of cultural diplomacy, regional integration, and fostering dialogue between business, the public sector, and artistic communities.

The article presents a comprehensive study of the piano component of the Kyiv Philharmonic’s concert activity in the 1960s, a field that remains rela-tively understudied in the history of Ukrainian musical performance. The focus is on identifying the repertoire characteristics of this period, the performance ap-proaches of leading pianist-soloists, and the educational mission of the Philhar-monic at the time. The study analyzes concert programs in which piano music oc-cupied a significant place. For the first time, the article introduces into scholarly circulation the most complete biographical and performance-related information to date about Roman Hindin, one of the leading pianists of the era. The significance of Vitalii Sechkin’s concert activity and his lectures at the Kyiv State Conservatory for the Philharmonic’s development in the 1960s is examined through concrete ex-amples. The touring activity of soloists, thematic orientations of concerts and lec-tures, and the involvement of foreign performers are also addressed. Additionally, the article outlines, in passing, a panorama of the concertmaster-pianists of the Kyiv Philharmonic during this decade. Considerable attention is devoted to the in-stitution’s repertoire policy, which combined the ideological directives of the pe-riod with the promotion of Ukrainian and international piano classics. The study is based on archival sources, particularly reports on the Philharmonic’s concert ac-tivities, which make it possible for the first time to systematically outline the scale and character of piano art within Ukraine’s leading concert institution of the 1960s.

The chamber vocal works of contemporary composers exhibit diversity in form, content, and presentation. Their unconventional structures guide both researchers and performers in exploring the meanings embedded in poetic symbols and in conveying the emotional and sensory narratives intended by the composer. Modern audiences demonstrate a readiness to engage with the heightened symbolism of poetic texts, experiencing shifts in perception when encountering chamber vocal music. This article examines the transformation of artistic symbolism under the influence of military strategy. Music fosters aesthetic experiences that evoke catharsis, arising from the emotional intensity of war-related symbols. Contemporary composers, responding to current realities, seek an adequate sonic language to reflect societal changes caused by war. This shift affects not only the emotional components of musical expression but also structural aspects, including individualized compositional forms, unconventional instrumental techniques, and explorations of novel sound systems. By structuring their works through dramatic reversals, composers utilize symbols as fundamental elements of musical form, layering artistic intent across multiple dimensions. The synthesis of voice and chamber instrumentation enables diverse artistic solutions, fostering experimental approaches influenced by military strategy. In this context, the symbol—rich in meaning—becomes central to the evolving aesthetic and structural landscape of contemporary chamber vocal music

The article examines the phenomenon of the traveling philosopher of the Ukrainian Baroque era Hryhoriy Skovoroda and examines the Ukrainian mentality by means of current artistic visions within the framework of the art project "...And rise!", dedicated to the 300th anniversary of his birth. The project presented various artistic approaches to the visualization of selected aspects — from traditional narrative to abstract. The article demonstrates how the project revealed important aspects of the thinker's legacy and proved that his ideas can be relevant for understanding contemporary issues and challenges, stimulating dialogue between different generations and helping to better understand how the past can influence contemporary artistic expressions and contribute to deepening the discussion of important today's topics through the prism of Skovoroda's philosophical heritage.

The article deals with the duality of a rational, sane worldview and an oppositional-irrational, namely a laughable and theatrical way of reinterpreting reality and life in this "other reality". It is emphasized that the instinct of play, theatricality, and a sense of humor from the earliest times (prehistoric eras) was and still is a manifestation of individual freedom. The instinct of play as a manifestation of cultural self-awareness is represented as a sign of psychological and mental health. Options for rethinking rational life within the framework of the "laughing instinct" are considered in the review of creative approaches to reality by Serhiy Parajanov (his collages), in the stage techniques of Bohdan Stupka. For the first time in Ukrainian art history, the "laughter" of Lucien Dulfan — an artist from Odesa, and since the 1980s — a New Yorker, has been considered. The Odessa "laughter space" was also traced in the works of Serhiy Bozhek and Igor Gusev (their anti-war work of 2022). The painting of Vladyslav Shereshevsky is visualized from the point of view of the "carnival double". Negativist, cynical manifestations of laughter and play in the works of individual representatives of Ukrainian contemporary art were also noted. The article analyzes the positive role of laughter in the works of Ukrainian artists of 2022–2023 in their protest against Putinism. The prognostic value of artistic gestures is illustrated on the example of Serhiy Parajanov's work, which, breaking the law of continuity and normality in art, in creative outbursts (moments of bifurcation), shake the old system of artistic thinking, offering novelty. Laughter in this situation is a guide to prognostication. The article shows how the creative theatricalization of the worldview, the transformation of the tragic into the comic with a joke, in a game and a laugh, is able to save a person not only from lame pragmatism in everyday life, but also from a tragic sense of well-being during periods of severe trials, in particular, when confronting the barbarism of war.

The article comprehensively examines NFT technology as a new phenomenon in the visual art of Ukraine. This newest component of digital art practice, despite its considerable success, has not been studied and needs to fix the main characteristics and determine the future prospects of development. Thus, the article traces the genesis of this technology, defines concepts, functions, advantages and disadvantages. The new NFT works were analyzed and the peculiarities of their influence on the perception of contemporary art by society were clarified. The author defines the place of NFT art both in the system of visual art of Ukraine and in the global creative paradigm. In addition, the discussions that are taking place in the professional artistic environment regarding the appropriate legal basis for the circulation of NFT in Ukrainian have been updated. In particular, the issues of clarifying the levels of protection and transfer of intellectual property rights of new digital assets are discussed both in the domestic situation and within the framework of international legal systems. New forms of organizing contemporary art exhibitions in the crypto world and changes in the general format of art collecting are also defined.

The article analyzes the transformation of the artistic consciousness of the majority of Ukrainian artists in the conditions of Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is traced how the barbarism of the orcs gave rise to psychological and creative resistance in the artistic environment. The logic in the grotesque-reductive series of works by V. Kravets is analyzed. The method of the artist’s work with the wide use of meaningful metaphors is shown. As a critic of the brutality and barbarism of the enemy army, the author of the drawings makes the body-lower sphere a generalizing image of the “all-Russian body”. It is shown that the characters of the series are monsters, their images are essentially excrement. This grotesque realism is so demeaning — hyperrealism, figurative recoding in the drawings of V. Kravets connects his method to the concept of the “tragic carnival” of German expressionism of the 1930s–1950s. Irony and sarcasm bordering on the terrible illustrate the relevance of a series of drawings, depicting existence on the shaky border between “life and death”. Laughter in the artist’s works changes from plus to minus.

The mythopoetics of Borys Liatoshynsky’s work is a little-researched phenomenon by modern musicology. Meanwhile, the “projections” of the myth, the outlines of the mythological plot, image, and motive, woven into the artistic plan, open new horizons for understanding the author’s concepts. The myth appears to be the key to deciphering the depths of interaction between the author, the work, and the character. Given that Liatoshynsky’s artistic ideas of the 1910s–1930s were modernistic, his artistic concepts have absorbed almost all the leading phenomena of European music of the first half of the twentieth century. They became the basis for the further development of Ukrainian musical culture. Without resorting to mythopoetics it is impossible to understand them in their diversity, complexity and contradiction. Mythopoetics, in the context of Liatoshynsky’s explorations, is manifested through the reflection of other European cultures, passionary personalities, and the realization of the myth of the hero in the works. This can be seen in the symbolistic chamber works of the 1920s, in operas in which the hero’s sacrifice acquires the epic scale of Greek tragedy, and in symphonic works whose characters are characterized by the duality of interpretation of the good and the evil. Wagner’s projections in the works of Borys Liatoshynsky of the 1910s and 1930s can be traced in two ways. On the one hand, due to the mythopoetic symbolism of the intentions of the Ukrainian composer, the kaleidoscopic discreteness of symbols-images-myths, obtained from the work of Scriabin, a consistent Wagnerian. A deeply tragic attitude showed itself to be an alienated imagery of concepts during an attempt to heal the traumatic experience of the First World War and the Civil War. On the other hand, the Wagnerian version of the heroic myth became basic for Liatoshynsky and was used in opera and symphonic concepts. This confusion of the myth, its symbolic and tragic context, was traumatically reflected in the fate of his Second and Third symphonies, and in its general form is embodied precisely in opera ideas

The article presents artistic projects in which the issue of gender is actualized. The above was carried out from the position of post-humanist ideas through the study of the impact of the development of technologies on modern socio-cultural processes. Thus, the projects created in different genres were analyzed, including post-cinema (“Night Walk for Edinburgh”, “A Total Jizzfest”) aimed at changing gender perceptions in society, Ellen Pearlman’s opera “Emotionally intelligent” Artificially Intelligent Brainwave Opera” (AIBO), in which, thanks to the involvement of artificial intelligence as an actor, gender opposition is reinforced. The Female Laptop Orchestra (FLO) project is dedicated to the support of female creativity, which, thanks to the involvement of information and communication tools, combines music creation with research in its activity. An important aspect of the considered projects is defined as interactivity, which is implemented by involving the viewer in the process of their creation. It was found that, on the one hand, the digital virtual space made it possible to reduce the importance of social roles or gender affiliation, thereby leveling the stereotype of the opposition between the author’s masculinity and femininity. On the other hand, with the development of machine learning technologies, a new opposition between the human author and the artificial intelligence in the same capacity is gradually emerging.