Squat Theatre

EAI Invites is a new public program series inviting guests to present a work or artist of their choosing from the collection. The series is intended to open the archive to fresh perspectives, providing a catalyst to consider familiar work from an unexpected angle or to call attention to artists or works that have a particular significance for the guest.

For the second installment, EAI is pleased to invite the Wooster Group’s Kate Valk, who has chosen to screen and discuss Pig, Child, Fire! by the radical Hungarian theater collective Squat Theatre. A document of a 1981 restaging of the 1977 performance, the work fuses disparate cultural elements including Dostoevsky's The Devils, 1940s gangster films, the music of Kraftwerk, a letter from Antonin Artaud to André Breton, concluding with a hallucinatory collapse of the stage and 'real life.' 

Tickets: general admission $7, students $5, free for EAI members

EAI presented a special evening devoted to the work of radical art and theater collective Squat Theatre, whose performances in the late 1970s and early 1980s questioned role playing, the act of spectatorship, and the boundaries between art and life, the fictive and the real. The screening at EAI was presented in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, where an installation by Squat Theatre is included in the exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama--Manhattan, 1970-1980, organized by Jay Sanders, the museum's Curator and Curator of Performance (on view Oct. 31, 2013 - Feb. 2, 2014).

The evening features a screening of the extraordinary two-part video Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free (1981, 83 min). Capturing one of Squat Theatre's key theatrical productions, Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free included video documentation of their live show of the same name as well as a film by the collective (originally played at the beginning of the show) that provides an astonishing glimpse of New York's downtown underground in the early '80s. Afterwards, Eva Buchmuller and Anna Koos from Squat Theatre joined Jay Sanders and EAI's Rebecca Cleman to discuss the collective's legendary history and iconoclastic approach to theater.

EAI and Rooftop Films collaborated on a screening of works involving direct television intervention. Rooftop films is a community-oriented film festival whose mission is to "bring the underground outdoors."