The Bread and Puppet Theatre is a long standing puppet troupe that perform politically themed puppet plays. They are currently located on a farm in Vermont, where it is possible to work on the farm and apprentice for their shows. The shows, which involve large puppets often made of paper mache, are usually socialist-inspired critiques of capitalist society. Many contemporary plays also have environmental themes. They are free of charge (although donations are heavily solicited) and at the smaller shows free bread is distributed.
Art
and Revolution
Reclaim the Streets
Construction of alternatives
Web homepage: http://www.pbpub.com/bread&puppet/bread.htm (not up to date or really official)
Email:
Snail mail:
RR2 153
Glover,
VT 05839-9423
Tel:802-525-3031
Spokespersons: Peter and Elka Schumann
Originally started in New York, then based briefly on the Cate farm in Vermont, a Circus in Paris, now based in Glover, Vermont. The troupe continues to tour the United States, and shows up at protests.
B&P started in the 1960s in NYC, with Peter Schumann at the helm. They performed avant garde puppet plays, often in lofts and storefronts. They became known for their performances in protest of the Vietnam War. In the late 60’s, the Schurmanns moved to Cate Farm in Vermont, and started the original Our Domestic Ressurection Circuses. These were carnivalesque events, with a main event using huge puppets and a number of sideshows. Particularly after the move to Glover, Vermont, the Circuses became events that a number of people (particularly neo-hippies and Phish-heads) flocked to.
Eventually, the Circuses grew to be festivals – an estimated 60,000 people attended in 1998 (Bell, John. The End of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus : Bread and Puppet Theater and Counterculture Performance in the 1990s TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 43, Number 3 (T 163), Fall 1999, pp. 62-80).
The 1998 Circus was also the last event of its kind – in an altercation with a local, a B&P goer was killed. After this event, Schumann decided the scope of the shows had become too large and unmanageable, and the annual summer event was discontinued. However, smaller scale weekly shows continue, on the themes of globalization, consumer culture and Uncle Fatso.
Schumann wrote of the first Circus:
Our Domestic Resurrection Circus will be an effort to find a new way of doing
circus that is more human, that is not merely a collection of superlatives,
of extraordinary feats arbitrarily mixed together, but something that becomes
a story of the world circus. [...] It has to do with just creating a big outside
attraction for the people in the area. It's a piece that shouldn't be traveled,
something we want to perform where we can integrate the landscape, that we can
do with real time and real rivers and mountains and animals. It's something
that is seen in the woods, up there in the hills, back here in the river. I
guess it would be called an "environment!
In Kourilsky, Françoise. 1974 "Dada and Circus." TDR 18, 1
(T61): 107-08, cited in Bell.
Although Bread and Puppets remains largely the artistic version of the Schumanns
(Peter particularly), there are a number of other members who have helped out
over the years, as well as the more seasonal apprentices. Below, John Bell explains
how the logistics of the growing festival were handled through voluntaristic
committees.
The organizational structure within the Bread and Puppet Theater developed in
response to the requirements of the Circus--organically (as it were) in an anarchistic
fashion, which is to say, in response to situations as they developed, with
individual members of various committees taking on responsibilities as they
saw fit. All met regularly with the Schumanns and other puppeteers. This organizational
democracy was quite different from the artistic leadership of Bread and Puppet,
which remained clearly the purview of Peter Schumann.
However, with the growing festival there were also growing problems. Bell particularly
saw a divide between the puppet shows and the event – he notes the increasing
numbers of people who never even made it to the shows and just remained in the
campground and partied.
By the mid-1990s, the "Bread and Puppet idea" of an alternative to
American capitalist culture become inextricably mixed with a different, more
"mainstream" vision of counterculture, often at odds with what we
intended with our performances.
Obviously, Berthold Brecht and experimental theatre is as huge influence. Many Bread and Puppets shows are explicitly tributes to Brecht. Marx and The Communist Manifesto are similarly commolnly cited, mainly for critiques of capitalism. Bach has been used, as well as text by Kurt Schwitters. There are also explicit references to anarchists, including Goldman and Berkman. (I imagine Alfred Jarry would have had an impact as well, but I haven’t found any explicit reference).
Elka’s grandparents, Scott and Helen Nearing, also were radicals. They
moved to Vermont where they ran a subsistence farm and published and educated
extensively on alternatives to capitalism.
corporate capitalism, dominators of nature, fat cats, Bush
They do not have an official website, but used to run an (apparently now defunct) internet forum. Word of mouth seems to be the most effective tool.
B&P has received coverage from both mainstream and alternative media. They appear on official sightseeing maps of Vermont. An article by High Times also greatly increased attendance of the Circuses.
B&P do plays. They are not typically violent plays. Instead, they use puppets and symbolic imagery. While B&P could be considered innovators in the field, puppets definitely caught on among activists in the 90s. Not really direct action, they are conveying a meaning through art.
There have been a number
of articles written about Bread and Puppet in TDR: The Drama Review. See Bell’s
article for a list of references, as well as the references at http://www.sagecraft.com/puppetry/papers/Schumann.html
.
There is a recent article by Schumann himself online at Project Muse, but for
some reason I cannot read it. If you are interested, here is the info:
Schumann, Peter. What, At the End of This Century, Is the Situation of Puppets
& Performing Objects? TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 43, Number 3 (T 163),
Fall 1999, pp. 56-61
Relevant External Groups:
San Francisco Mime Troupe http://www.sfmt.org/
ACT UP http://www.actupny.org/
Wise Fool Puppet Intervention http://www.zeitgeist.net/wfca/wisefool.htm
Workers' Laboratory Theater - Shock Troupe
The Puppetistas