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Puppet theatre, Peter Schumann, says is "anarchic and untameable by nature." Its materials are cheap - paper, rags, and wood scraps. Its history is subversive. Its stage is the street. Schumann has created a prophetic, political and religious theatre for our time. David Cayley relates the history of the Bread and Puppet Theatre and the ideas on which it is based.

In New York City, in the early 1960's a new theatre was born - the Bread and Puppet Theatre - named for the coarse, flavourful sourdough bread that was given out at its performances, and for the grave, evocative puppet figures that were the theatre's main performers. The theatre was created by Peter Schumann, a German born dancer, musician, and sculptor who found in puppet theatre a way of blending all these arts into a form uniquely his own. Schumann's art is deeply political, but he has also won artistic acclaim for the sculptural genius of his puppets and for the solemn theatrical ceremonies he has created with them. His style is often called Expressionist for its rough, vigorous, suggestive qualities. In France in 1968 his work was so much à la mode that students pounded on the doors of sold-out theatres until they were allowed in. But, despite this glowing artistic reputation, Schumann has always stayed close to puppetry's popular roots. He has kept his theatre poor, anarchic and non-commercial and poured his talents into the restoration of popular forms like pageants, parades and passion plays.

During the 60's in New York, Bread and Puppet took their theatre to the streets, creating outdoor shows, giving expression to neighborhood issues and taking part in peace parades. But the company also performed in indoor settings, and, in 1966, created a sensation with a show called Fire, a slow, prayerful, dreamlike choreography for masked performers which honoured three Americans who had immolated themselves in protest against the Vietnam War. When French theatre promoter Christian Dupavillon saw Fire, he invited the company to the World Theatre Festival in the French city of Nancy in 1968. The newspaper, Le Monde, called Bread and Puppet's performance "a revelation," and, during the next few years, the company experienced a period of rock star celebrity in Western Europe. The experience was somewhat disorienting for a poor, anarchist theatre used to performing in a loft above a gypsy club under the Williamsburg Bridge, but it led to a number of successful European tours during which the company made friends and converts to their style of puppetry. Notable shows of this period included The Cry of the People for Meat and That Simple Light May Come From Complicated Darkness.

In 1970 Peter Schumann and his family left New York to become the theatre in residence at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. This led to the creation of our Domestic Resurrection Circus, an annual event that would eventually become one of the most extraordinary cultural happenings of our time. Schumann envisioned a rebirth of the tradition of popular carnivals and festivals that, with the exception of a few commercialized relics, has died out in the modern world. The circus was a puppet pageant, set in the magnificent landscape of northern Vermont, which adapted the Paradise/Fall/Resurrection structure of old religious plays to a contemporary political setting. People were enthralled and the circus eventually attracted 30,000-40,000 people each summer. These numbers eventually proved overwhelming, and when someone was accidentally killed in a fight in one of the campgrounds, the circus was discontinued, a victim of its own success.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre has toured all over the world, often on a shoestring, and, wherever they have gone, they have seeded a vision of puppetry as the theatre for our time: cheap, accessible,
de-professionalized and able to give voice to all that has been hurt and forgotten in the on-rush of civilization. They have performed in settings as diverse as Nicaraguan villages and Polish opera houses. When Sarajevo was under siege, Peter Schumann went there and performed. In 2002 the company continues to tour and produce new work. The number of shows Schumann has created number in the hundreds and include work in many different styles, from simple ten-minute performances that can be put on by two people in the street to full length theatre pieces that require casts of twenty or more. One of Schumann's specialties is adapting Christian liturgies to contemporary political circumstances: this has produced insurrection masses, passion plays with today's political victims substituted for Jesus, funeral marches for rotten ideas, cardboard oratorios, and fiddle sermons. These last are jeremiads during which Schumann accompanies his prophecy with furious bowing on his scratch fiddle.

During the forty years of Bread and Puppet's existence, hundreds of puppeteers have worked with Peter Schumann. The theatre has always lived on the margins, accepting no subsidy and often performing for free; but people who have embraced its vision have always been willing to come and work for a pittance in order to share in the vibrancy of Peter Schumann's artistic and political vision. A number of these puppeteers have gone on to start their own companies. Bread and Puppet has also been one of the sources of the current efflorescence of political puppetry. During recent demonstrations against the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the Republican National Convention that nominated George Bush, puppeteers have been arrested and abused by the police and had their puppets confiscated and destroyed. Many of these puppeteers got their training and their inspiration from Bread and Puppet. One young activist calls Bread and Puppet "the mother-ship."

The Bread and Puppet Theatre is one of a kind, a product of a unique artistic genius, and it is unlikely that its shows will ever be remounted or performed by anybody else. But there is a record of the beauty and the brilliance of Schumann's painterly and sculptural talents: the Bread and Puppet Museum. It's an old barn on the farm in northeastern Vermont where Peter Schumann, his wife Elka and his current company of puppeteers live. In the museum are displayed the puppets that have been used in shows going back to the 60s. The effect is overwhelming and has been compared to being in a paper maché cathedral. Puppetry, in the age of television, has often been thought of as a cute, tame, and somewhat childish art, full of winsome Kermits, Cookie Monsters, and Howdy Doodies. Peter Schumann has taken this ancient art in a different direction, creating work that is artistically adventurous while always remaining politically engaged. "The pictures and sculptures which are the meat of puppetry," he says, "are ordered by a strange ambition: to provide the world with an unfragmented and uncontrollably large picture of itself, a picture which only puppetry can draw, a picture which praises and attacks at the same time, a theatrum mundi, which includes the desire of the world to be what it can be."

The Photographs of Ron Simon
Ron Simon has been photographing Bread and Puppet performances since the 1980's, and particularly the Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant that was held annually in East Glover, Vermont until 1998, and now continues in the form of smaller circuses on summer weekends. The circuses and pageants were held on the Bread and Puppet farm in a large field with a natural amphitheatre for the audience at one end. Ron Simon is working on a book about Bread and Puppet, along with writer Marc Estrin. Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread and Puppet Theater is to be published by Chelsea Green Publishing in the Spring, 2004, in cloth, paper and numbered editions. To see more work by Ron Simon visit his web site or visit the Bread and Puppet Theatre web site.

The Photographs of George Dennison
George Dennison was an essayist and novelist who died in 1987. In New York he wrote a perceptive review of a Bread and Puppet show called Fire for The Village Voice, one of the first such appreciations. His family and the Schumann family later became friends and two of his children, Susie and Michael, performed with Bread and Puppet. He kept notes on the theatre towards a book he never finished. His literary executors, Taylor Stoehr and Geoffrey Gardner assembled these and published them as An Existing Better World (see bibliography) in 2000. His photographs of the theatre appear here by permission of his family.

Puppet Uprising is based on extensive interviews with Peter Schumann and many of the people who have worked closely with him. It's available as four cassettes or CDs for $32.00, or as a printed transcript for $22.00. Write to us at Ideas Transcripts, Box 500, Station A, Toronto M5W 1E6, or e-mail , or call 416 205-7367 and order by credit card.

Photo credits:
In order of appearance on this page: 1. George Dennison, 2. Woodcut by Peter Schumann, 3. Lifemasks from Fire, 1966 by Elka Schumann, 4. George Dennison,
5. Woodcut by Peter Schumann, 6. Postcard design, Sean-Michael, 7. Bread and Puppet Museum, 1998 postcard, photo by John C. Boeckeler. All photographs by Ron Simon and George Dennison appear with permission. George Dennison photographs are from his book An Existing Better World, Notes on the Bread and Puppet Theater, published by Autonomedia, 2000.

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