Ian Watson's article looks at two separate but interrelated subjects – the role of the arts in remedying urban dereliction, now a global phenomenon; and the development of one specific arts gathering in healing the larger wounds of Peruvian society after years of civil warfare and economic chaos. It was from the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, in the late sixteenth century, that the first noteworthy revolt against the Spanish Conquistadors was launched, by the legendary Inca leader Túpac Amaru. It was to this city that Mario Delgado, founder of the Lima-based group Cuatrotablas, invited the Third Theatre gathering, just two years after its inauguration from Eugenio Barba's initiative in 1976. The use of the city as a base for the most prominent of the guerrilla groups made a decennial return of the Third Theatre gathering impossible – and the reasons for holding the 1998 gathering in Ayacucho all the stronger, not least because of the choice of the city by the state-funded agency PromPeru as a focus for national cultural regeneration. Ian Watson, an Advisory Editor and regular contributor to NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey, knits together the threads of the story.