Squat theatre Staging Life/Living on Stage Anna Koós quat Theatre is known for having presented provocative, avant-garde perfor- mances in a New York storefront from 1977 to 1983. The stage was situated Sinside, in front of the window. Seats on risers served as the auditorium in the back of the store. The audience watched what transpired on the stage and beyond it, through the window, in the street — an extension of the stage, or a living back- ground, if you like. Our collective work began in Budapest in 1970. We were young artists, poets, former members of a university ensemble who formed an independent theatre company. In the Cold War, the Communist government in Hungary did not tolerate gatherings, cultural or otherwise, beyond its direct control. Our performances were banned in 1972. After four more years of skirting around prohibition (performing underground on the fringes of officialdom, mostly in private apartments) and fending off infiltrat- ing informers, the police, and even the neighbors, our theatre company was given the green light to emigrate, with four small children in tow. The core of the group which stayed together from 1970 until 1985 included five friends, namely: Stephan Balint (1943–2007), Peter Berg (b. 1947), Eva Buchmuller (b. 1943), Peter Halasz (1943–2006), and myself, Anna Koós (b. 1948). (Since our personalities mattered much, here I call us by our first names except Berg, to avoid mixing up the two Peters.) In the fifteen years of our collaboration, several other people joined us and sooner or later parted with us, two more children were born, and languages changed. We took the name “Squat Theatre” in 1977 when our first storefront performance — Pig, Child, Fire! — premiered in Holland. After a successful run at the festival of Nancy in France, we crossed the Atlantic and settled in New York. From October 1977 to October 1985, Squat rented a building in Chelsea, at 256 West 23rd Street. We had a storefront to perform in, and three more floors in which to live. None of this happened as happy-go-luckily as it may seem in an abbreviated history. Performances do not usually survive their making. They may at best be remembered by everyone present. Plays we did not write; scenarios we agreed on among our- selves and kept in our heads; acting we shunned from the start; methods we did 24 PAJ 105 (2013), pp. 24–40. © 2013 Anna Koós doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 not learn or teach. After describing the succession of events on stage and publishing the texts used in the performances (Eva Buchmuller and Anna Koós, Squat Theatre, New York: Artists Space, 1996), I embarked on writing a book about the ways our lives and the theatre we made enmeshed and depended on each other (Anna Koós, Szinházi történetek: szobában, kirakatban, English: Theatrical Stories: from Living Room to Storefront, Budapest: Akadémiai, 2009). Like all three Squat plays in Western emi- gration, the first in New York — Andy Warhol’s Last Love — was collectively created and produced. It played in New York (1978–1979), Rotterdam (1978), Hamburg (The Festival of Nations, 1979), Belgrade (BITEF, 1979), Milan, Brussels, Rome, and Flor- ence (1979), Cologne (Theater der Welt, 1981), and again during The Golden Age of Squat Theatre Festival (New York, 1982). The three-part performance took place on three “stages,” none of which were stages, strictly speacking. For Part One the performing group and the audience gathered on the second floor, in the living room of Eva and Stephan. Having listened to a radio message from Andromeda, everyone walked down to the storefront. Part Two was a black-and-white film projected onto a cotton curtain hanging in the storefront window, visible from both inside and outside. Part Three used the area inside and the sidewalk outside, and began with Andy Warhol’s arrival from the street chaperoning a short overweight woman: Kathleen, the witch. She proceeded to perform a ritual in the nude then sat down to answer Andy’s pre-recorded questions live (Warhol’s voice was Mark Amitin’s). Meanwhile, three women from Andromeda gathered on the sidewalk. One of them, Ulrike Meinhof’s twelve-year-old reincarnation, entered the stage to interview Andy, eventually re-enacting Valery Solanas’s 1968 shooting attack. The following excerpts from Chapter Seven of my book Theatrical Stories: From Liv- ing Room to Storefront are about the creation of Andy Warhol’s Last Love. It starts in 1978, seven months after Squat cleared immigration at JFK. THE YEAR OF THE HORSE When the Gregorian calendar registers February, Chinese around the world celebrate the New Year. In Chinatown the celebration lasts for several days. A nocturnal parade winds its way through narrow streets in lower Manhattan. We must have landed on another planet. On my first outing to Chinatown, I was dazzled by its unfamiliar objects, the deni- zens’ habits and gestures. East of Broadway, fishmongers lined small streets in the vicinity of Canal Street, their stands slumping under the dawn’s catch. In landlocked Hungary, fish markets were rare if there were any. Fishstands in Paris were narrow stalls lining the sidewalk in front of the first floor of the building they occupied. After hours they vanished — cashier, scales, and counter all folded up and pressed against the wall behind shutters pulled down to the ground, all in one pop-up book as it were. In Chinatown, it was the opposite. The fishstands not only jutted out over the sidewalk but they also spread across the building — no windows or doors, the store entirely open. The catch of the day was laid in trays filled with crushed ice: clams, mussels, oysters, tuna, dwarf shark, squid, cod, scallops, shellfish, fluke, mollusk, KOÓS / Squat Theatre 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 hermit crab, lobster, eel, turtle, and unnameable others. Vegetables of all kinds piled up in crates on the sidewalk near the stands, vegetables I had never seen before, let alone eaten, along with smelly dried or smoked fish and seaweed. At the foot of the rear of a downtown prison, two cobblers worked sitting on tiny stools — no shop, not even a makeshift booth. Tools wrapped in linen lay on the ground. Next to them a thin Asian man squatted at the edge of the sidewalk, sculpting and folding dried bamboo leaves into palm-size pieces of praying mantis, butterfly, and dragonfly. I bought one of each. All sorts of medicines lined the shelves at the drugstore. If one cared to rise up on tip-toe and look through the upper window of a wooden front door, a curious sight might come into view: half-gallon glass jars filled with various dry concoctions, salted and dried white sea horses, dried algae, chrysanthemum, and calendula flower, small balls of uncanny mixtures of dried herbs and minerals. The Chinese herbalist spoke no English. Once I entered a Buddhist temple next door. Candlelight, empty space, an altar, incense burning, tiny bells hanging from above. Quiet. Shambala Center was on West 22nd Street, many blocks to the North. Curiously enough, we lived on West 23rd Street but were unaware of it while there. Shambala Center had Allen Ginsberg lying in repose in the spring of 1998. It so happened then that I turned on the radio one early morning while I was painting toy soldiers to supplement my income, or to have something meditative to do within my hectic schedule. WBAI 99.5 FM. Amy Goodman was on the air, I liked her reports. As I remember, she was saying: “The ceremony over, everyone has cleared the room. Only the two of us have stayed on: Allen Ginsberg’s cold body and I.” The New Year’s parade started from the little square at the confluence of three streets where the statue of Confucius stands. Germinating bamboo shoots in glasses of water decorated Chinatown’s windows, and steam billowed onto the sidewalks from restaurant kitchens. At the head of the parade a gigantic red and gold dragon puppet danced at rods’ ends. It reminded me of the chimeras on display at the Met. Behind the dancing dragon Chinese New Yorkers banged instruments, threw confetti and ticker-tape, lit sparklers, and tossed firecrackers. The loud racket chased the evil spirits away from places and from the coming year. Nineteen seventy-eight was the Year of the Horse. Stephan’s uncle — the sculptor Joseph Jakovits, Yaki to us, who had immigrated to New York twenty years before — took him and Eva to the parade. Yaki bought a red poster with a picture of a brown horse in profile — a present for Eva. She pinned it up in their room above the table. This was the source of inspiration for filming Andy Warhol riding a horse through Chinatown. FORWARD WITH A NEW PLAY! In early 1978, we still had not come up with a new play. Not that New York necessarily expected it from us but we thought our life — as a theatre and as a group — hinged on it. Thoughts of our survival kept worrying and simultaneously driving each of us, in separate phases and different constellations. A gorge opened up and yawned behind us: there was no stepping back. 26 PAJ 105 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00158 by guest on 30 September 2021 Continuous talk went on among us that sometimes crashed into a dead end or mutual silence.