ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the centrality of the city of Lisbon. Fado, through the combination of word, music and gesture that has become solidified as the music's style, performs place in a very particular way, summoning up a mythology that attempts to trace the remembered and imagined city of the past via a poetics of haunting. The chapter discusses the dialogue between fado and theory, to bring together the ideas of the city expressed by fadistas such as Carlos do Carmo and Jose Carlos Ary dos Santos with those expressed by theorists such as Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. It mentions Lefebvre's thoughts on cities as 'works', 'products' and 'works of art'. When Alain Badiou speaks of the theatre-idea as a possibility that only emerges from the theatrical event, he puts in mind the absolute precedence of this event. As Certeau and Lefebvre point out, this scriptural process can only be a reduction of lived experience.
