REVIEWS proscenium theatre. Street theatre rebels against the hierarchial setup inside auditoria where the actor and audience are separated with the audience 'sitting out' in darkness and where within the audience itself there is a hierarchy. Anuradha Kapoor, expanding on this point, said that in street theatre the audience is as creative as the actor, participating in the process and seeing creatively. The audience enters into a tacit agreement with the actors to see what is meant to be seen and to ignore what is not. It is a situation which allows for maximum interaction between actor and audience and scope for imagination. Namwar Singh, in his paper on radical aesthetics, first attacked the existing bourgeois aesthetics for turning art into an object and hence a commodity. Art has been separated from life and given an unreal identity. The function of a radical aesthetics is to examine the existing aesthetics, go to its roots and uproot it to make way for a new and human understanding of art. There were several other smaller issues which were discussed at the workshop. The inability of participants of street theatre groups, so far, to work out a doctrine or to critically understand'their work and the experience they get was one such issue. Many groups expressed the need for keeping in touch with each other, helping each other in everyway and working towards building an organization. Participants constantly leaving to seek theii livelihood elsewhere, leaving a gap> is another practical problem. So too the fear that all the work might eventually come to nothing. City bred upper class street theatre actors are a minority. Most groups have people who live in the interior, in small towns and villages, who know and understand their regions and the problems of the people there. But they are unable to think with a national perspective. Lacking institutional support, they have to constantly struggle to survive. This is perhaps one reason why they do not think of going beyond the accepted norms of dissents It was an accepted fact in the initial stages in the rise of street theatre groups that they had to neglect or could not afford to concentrate on quality. But, as Anuradha Kapoor observed, this is now becoming an excuse for doing indifferent theatre. Cliches are repeated, the same plots are done over and over again, the story lines are weak and the acting is b^d. 70 April-June 1983