from the catalogue: The videotape of this theater production by Squat Theatre, originally staged in 1978, is made up of three episodes loosely constructed around the notion of an encounter between Andy Warhol and Ulrike Meinhof, the German terrorist who died in prison in 1977, reportedly by her own hand. This phantasmagorical meeting is between two wildly different embodiments of contemporary alienation. "Squat takes symptoms from everyday life and invents outlandish diseases to fit them. The effort is funny, wrong-headed, valuable, and unreasonably accomplished." (The New York Times)"· Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free (1980-84) OBIE Award for Best New American Play (1982), Villager Award (1982)
video available from the Kitchen
from the catalogue: "In this videotape of their Obie-Award-winning play, Squat Theatre targets the dearest elements of American culture placing them in unfamiliar juxtaposition: sex, soft music, violence and power. A belly dancer pulls up in a jeep, a maimed soldier dies in a hammock; disparate elements combine to sharpen our awareness of the brutal and grotesque in American life. The central image of Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free is a 12-foot papier-mache baby with stereo headphones for ears and television screens for eyes featuring Busby Berkeley dance spectaculars and an Esther Williams water ballet. At the end of the performance, the eyes light up with the image of former Velvet Underground member, Nico, singing (out of sync) "New York, New York." Even though the lights go up, Nico remains trapped in the baby's eyes, still singing.·
· Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Theater in Trance (1980) - Squat Theatre in Cologne, at "Theater der Welt"
· The Golden Age of Squat Theatre, a retrospective of three major pieces (1982)
· Dreamland Burns (1985-86)
video available from Electronic Art Intermix
from the catalogue: "Combining film and theater, Dreamland Burns extends Squat Theatre's fascination with American outcasts and urban landscapes into a straight-forward narrative which blends tales of lost love and crime in the streets in a melancholy reflection on contemporary New York.
Dreamland Burns is a dreamlike collage where the story of a separation, in a 30-minute black-and-white film, turns into the inside world of dreams. People are projections of the mind's world. Squat Theatre projects exact film images on lifeless puppets and "brings them to life." Film once more outdoes life when in the dream a dream is explained from a film script; nothing is certain. Furniture falls from the ceiling and an extra-terrestrial descends from above. Maybe it's just the irony of an actress with a neon halo.
Some of the most adventurous theater created anywhere during the last ten years." (Roger Copeland, The New York Times)
· L-Train to Eldorado, commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music (1987-88)
OTHER films/plays/performances
Karen Luner film (1979)
Dubbed in Glamour, a night of performances by Edit D'Ak in the Kitchen (still on Broome street in 1980)
Eric Mitchell, Facts of Life (1984) - on the photo with Boris Major
Links