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S Q U A T Nature Theatre of New York Gautam Dasgupta They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. Pozzo in Waiting for Godot THE CITY AND THE THEATRE # 1 The year was 1975, the city Budapest. Somewhere in the inner city, at the farthest limit of an intricate grid of winding streets, stood an unappealing facade of forgotton masonry graced by an oversized wooden double door. Cut into one half of the door was a smaller entrance way, a frame within a frame, so characteristic of old European architecture. Once inside, the vista broadened out to encompass a sprawling courtyard, the surface of its rough-hewn, pebbled bed overgrown with weeds. Rising along its perimeter were four or five stories of apartment units, each floor girdled by a wrought iron balcony overlooking the courtyard. To the right of the entrance way stood a wide marbled staircase, its former grandeur now a faint memory, but its haunting beauty captured forever in the writings of Kafka. The apartment complex itself seemed a relic of days gone by, of pleasanter days perhaps. But on that day in 1975, the cruel silence locked behind the individual doors to each residential unit bespoke of 7 the despair and anguish of a nation tucked away, incommunicado, behind the Iron Curtain. Those individual pockets of fear and secrecy, families and households wracked by uncertainty, and people deformed by the hypocrisies of social, political, and cultural forms was the landscape of Hungarian novelist George Konrad's "fictions," the very same Konrad who had befriended a family of artists that lived behind one of those closed doors. If in those days this intrepid band of theatre artists had a name, I was not told of it then. In Hungary, as in many East European countries, it is better to remain nameless. To retain one's essential freedom, it becomes necessary to shed exterior forms, if not altogether to erase or blur the contours of one's self. And this not to blend in unobtrusively with the flock but to define one's self as supremely alone, to will a nothingness, to create an antiform (a non-form, if you will) that is impervious to the designs of power. It was only later, in 1977, when this troupe of theatrical artists in search of fertile artistic grounds-much like the Gypsies of their native Hungary-left in exile were they given a name, and that name was "Squat." There were no announcements in the local dailies about their performances that night in Budapest. The faithful knew, the way one knows the truth. As in the Biblical story of the shepherds who had a dream telling them where to go, so too was it that night in 1975. A silent voice, a message from the unknown , directing the chosen few to the cramped quarters of Squat's abode. Since no one could congregate outside on the balcony for fear of being reported to the authorities (revolutionary modes of art practice have little to do with the revolutionary fervor of socialist or communist partisans), members of the audience-mostly young, unkempt, and smoking American brand name cigarettes-were herded into a tiny room adjoining the slightly larger living/performance room. We were asked to keep silent and not to applaud at any time during or after the performances. In a world where the living die a slow death, strangulated by the life-denying forms of a repressive order, walls seem to take on a life of their own: they sprout ears. And then, standing shoulder to shoulder with that audience, unable to utter a sound, I realized how introspective the mind gets. All of reality is played out on the stages of the inner mind. Objects and gestures picked out by the eye become protagonists in the inner drama of the mind. Surrealism becomes the sole artistic mode in which the mind functions if it is to fulfill the dictates of its conscience. As walls usurp auditory functions, the visual and tactile sense perceptions gain prominence. Theatre, derived from the Greek theatron, a place for viewing, here regains its original...

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