Bread & Puppet Theatre

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER

Photo Gallery

The Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in this country. It was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City's Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand-puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police and other problems of that neighborhood. More complex theater pieces, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners, followed. The puppets grew bigger and bigger. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street.

During the Vietnam War, Bread and Puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people. In 1970 Bread & Puppet moved to Vermont as theater-in- residence at Goddard College, combining puppetry with gardening and bread baking in a serious way, learning to live in the countryside and letting itself be influenced by the experience. In 1974 the Theater moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year-old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. 'Our Domestic Resurrection Circus,' a two-day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.

Through invitations by Grace Paley, Bread and Puppet Theater became a frequent attraction at anti-Vietnam War events in the '60s and '70s. By the '80s, the puppets had become emblematic of activist pacifism and a sine qua non of American political theater, as exemplified by the massive, ascending figures that are burned into the memory of anyone who marched with or saw the haunting, massive June 12, 1982 Disarmament Parade in New York City.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad and from sales of Bread & Puppet Press's posters and publications. Internationally, Bread and Puppet Theater performs massive spectacles with hundreds of participants, sometimes devoted to social, political and environmental issues and sometimes simply to the trials of everyday life. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers. After each performance, the company distributes bread and aioli (garlic sauce) to the audience.

Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Silesia. He is married to Elka Leigh Scott and they live in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. They have five children and four grandchildren.

You cannot understand Bread and Puppet's work without acknowledging that it is grounded in dance, but not in formal or classical dance. Schumann's artistic pedigree is a mixture of dance and visual art. There's dance at the bottom of all of Schumann's work, but since puppet theater is traditionally a 'melting pot' of all the different arts, this is frequently obscure.

Schumann studied and practiced sculpture and dance in Germany and in 1959, with a childhood friend, musician Dieter Starosky, Schumann, created the Gruppe für Neuen Tanz (New Dance Group), which invented dances which sought to break out of the strict limits of both classical ballet and the expressionist dance tradition.

He moved to the USA with his wife, Elka, and their two children in 1961. His formative years in the Lower East Side during the early '60s were heavily influenced by the radical innovations spearheaded John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Schumann rejected the elitism of the '60s arts scene and embraced the anti-establishment, egalitarian work of American artist Richard (Dicky) Tyler. He embraced Outsider Art: everyday movement, improvisation, direct momentary composition, and the jazz impulse toward overall creativity. He became a regular at Judson Poet's Theater and Phyllis Yampolsky's Hall of Issues, where puppet shows included making music and marching around. Street Theater productions followed, at rent strikes and voter registration rallies in the East Village, with crankies on garbage cans and speeches by a Puerto Rican neighborhood organizer, Bert Aponte.

He admired the abstraction of Merce Cunningham, and attended lectures at the Cunningham studio, but ultimately rebelled against it. In an interview with John Bell in 1994, he said, Cunningham demanded of his dancers was a classical ballet background. He refused to work with anybody who didn't have that. I totally disagreed. I had traveled around in Europe teaching dance; to Sweden, to a dance academy and various places, pretending I was a great ass in dance, and gave them classes. And they took me — I was fresh and I just did it. I said, 'I'll show you what dance really is; what you do is just schlock,' and I tried to liberate them from aesthetics connected to modern dance and classical ballet and to these various modes of existing dance at the time.''

The most recent creative history of Bread and Puppet Theater was written by Holland Cotter in the New York Times last summer. Cotter described Peter Schumann's epics as 'spectacle for the heart and soul.' He commended Schumann for the courage 'to live an ideal of art as collective enterprise, a free or low-cost alternative voice outside the profit system.' He testified that one summer, on a mountainside in Glover, VT, Bread and Puppet gave him the single most beautiful sight he's ever seen in a theater. And when Bread and Puppet led the nuclear freeze parade in New York City during United Nations sessions on disarmament, it was 'one of the most spectacular pieces of public theater the city has ever seen.' He added, 'For me the real affirmation of the disarmament pageant lay less in the fact that Mr. Schumann came to New York and created this hugely ambitious collective work of art than in the fact that immediately afterward he returned to Vermont, to a farm, to a barn, to the outdoor baking oven, to his workshops and to his own work, which has come to include an increasing amount of painting, most of which stays out of the art world’s sight.'

For more information on the Bread and Puppet Theater, log onto www.breadandpuppet.org.