Bread & Puppet

The Bread & Puppet Theater is a politically radical puppet theater, active since the 1960s, currently based in Glover, Vermont. The name Bread & Puppet derives from the theater's practice of sharing its own fresh bread, for free, with the audience of each performance as a means of creating community, and from its central principle that art should be as basic to life as bread. Its founder and director is Peter Schumann.

The Theater was founded in 1962-1963 in New York City. It was active during the Vietnam War in anti-war protests, primarily in New York. It is often remembered as a central part of the political spectacle of the time, as its enormous puppets (often ten to fifteen feet tall) were a fixture of many demonstrations. In 1970 the Theater moved to Vermont, where it still resides; there is a Bread & Puppet Museum on its Vermont land, showcasing its decades of work. The Bread & Puppet Theater has received National Endowment for the Arts grants.

Until 1998 the Theater hosted an annual Pageant, or Circus (in full, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus), in and around a natural amphitheater on its Glover grounds. In the 1990s the festival became very large, drawing crowds in the tens of thousands of people who camped on nearby farmers' land over the summer weekend of the pageant. The event became unmanageably large and less and less concerned with the theater's performance. In 1998 a man was accidentally killed in a fight while camping overnight for the festival, and director Peter Schumann subsequently cancelled the festival. Since then the theater has instead offered smaller weekend performances all summer long, and travelled around New York and New England performing.

At public protests, the vivid narrative of puppetry often attracts attention from both the media and the police. Official paranoia surrounding street protests has led to extreme measures from the authorities as recently as the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. "A couple of our folks were down there, helping to build puppets," said Linda Elbow, company manager. "The cops went into the studio of Spiral Q Puppet Theater, arrested people, and took the puppets. So, now, puppets are criminals."

Until 2000, the Bread & Puppet Theater was a staple of the New York Halloween Parade, until it was disinvited by officially-appointed parade organizer Jeanne Fleming. After September 11, 2001 the Theater returned to New York with The Insurrection Mass with Funeral March for a Rotten Idea, a "non-religious service." The "Insurrection Masses" are a common format for the Bread & Puppet Theater, as are such "Funerals," though the rotten ideas change.

In addition to the theater, some of the Bread & Puppet puppeteers operate the Bread & Puppet Press, directed by Elka Schumann, who is Peter Schumann's wife (and granddaughter of Scott Nearing). The press produces posters, cards and books on the Theater's themes as well as other forms of "cheap art." The broadsheet Why Cheap Art? Manifesto is among the press's best-known products.

Among the writers to have praised and participated in the Bread & Puppet Theater are the children's performer Paul Zaloom, the writer Grace Paley, the historian Howard Zinn, who praises its "magic, beauty, and power," and the poet and radio commentator Andrei Codrescu, who wrote: "The Bread & Puppet Theater has been so long a part of America's conscious struggle for our better selves, that it has become, paradoxically, a fixture of our subconscious." Codrescu also praised "the genius of Peter Schumann, the prodigious Puppet-God."

References

• Marc Estrin and Ronald T. Simon, Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (ISBN 1931498199).
• George Dennison, An Existing Better World: Notes on the Bread & Puppet Theater (ISBN 1570270724).
• Stefan Brecht, The Bread & Puppet Theater (2 vols., ISBN 041601691X).

External links

• A report on Bread & Puppet (http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/bread_puppet/) by the CBC, with texts by Peter Schumann (http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/bread_puppet/text.html), photographs and a Bread & Puppet bibliography
• A brief history of the Bread & Puppet Theater (http://bailey.uvm.edu:6336/dynaweb/findingaids/bredpupt/@Generic__BookTextView/85;cs=default;ts=default;pt=104), with inventory of special collection, from the Bailey/Howe Library of the University of Vermont
• Photographer Ronald T. Simon's Bread & Puppet photos (http://www.fineprintphoto.com/bread/)
• Photos of the Theater (http://www.theaterofmemory.com/art/bread/photos.html)
• Discussion of 1998 Pageant (http://www.scenesofvermont.com/bread&puppet/bread.htm)
• The Why Cheap Art? Manifesto (http://www.aisling.net/am/cheapart.htm)
• Videos of the Bread & Puppet Theater from Green Valley Media (http://www.greenvalleymedia.org/bread_puppet.php3?ticket=)
• TheaterMania (http://1067litefm.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm?int_news_id=1808): news feature December 3, 2001