Born 1906 in Dublin (Ireland), Samuel Beckett was a playwright, novelist and poet who wrote in both English and French. His trilogy of novels beginning with Molloy paved the way for the French literary movement of Nouveau Roman, and Waiting for Godot (first performed in 1953) earned him recognition as master of the Theatre of the Absurd. Interested in new media, he also wrote for television and radio. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He worked as an assistant to James Joyce, who revolutionalized contemporary literature, and often played chess with "the father of contemporary art," Marcel Duchamp. Beckett died in Paris in 1989. Screening at AT13, Quad (1981) is a television play, written by Beckett in his later years, that consists of four performers dressed in robes, walking at a quick pace around and diagonally across a square stage in fixed patterns. About this work philosopher Gilles Deluze writes, "Beckett's text is perfectly clear: it is a question of exhausting space." ("The Exhaused," trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco.)

photo: Yolanda Romero Guerrero