Here are several texts by Peter Schumann. The Radical Cheese Manifesto is a transcription of a larger poster. It was written for a gathering of radical puppet theatres at Bread and Puppet in the summer of 2001. Puppetry and The New World Order is a publication of the Bread and Puppet Press. The other texts are excerpted from Stefan Brecht, The Bread and Puppet Theatre (see bibliography).

Radical Cheese Manifesto | Dance of Death | Puppetry Christ | World A New | Puppetry in the New World Order

THE DANCE OF DEATH - Program notes for a dance performance at Judson Church in 1962.

Nowadays the term "folklore" is understood to mean singing folk songs, dancing folk dances, etc., i.e. stealing from some period or other its innermost being, its glory. Folklore never called itself "folklore." What nowadays one means by the term in the period in question was as right as nourishment, as necessary as nourishment, and was simply good nourishment ("die schoene Nahrung"). There are still some places where something like that exists. But only he has it for whom it's a necessity, who can't sing anything except just that, who needs no other song and no other place. Those who sing Yiddish songs as well as Spanish ones, and those who have it on phonograph records betray themselves. They are the users and the gourmets ("die Nutzniesser und die Geniesser"): they don't have it.

Only he who has only one soul has a soul, only he who has only one song has a song, and similarly for dance. If, feeling our way back to the origin, we knew more precisely what it means to "have" a dance - to dance in forms that one has not chosen, in forms specifically resulting from everything one does in one's life and in action, in forms that are ineluctable, bare of artifice, devoid of refinements of detail - if we could intuit in dancing or in music this little bit of necessity, we would already have a grip on how to begin to dance or to make music. I know how much nonsense is spoken about "necessity." Any just three quarters intelligent painter nowadays justifies his work with concepts of this sort. But by "necessaity" I don't mean anything personal. I don't mean this Something to which, irresponsibly, one feels oneself driven. (A Berliner may feel himself driven to dance in Spanish only.) To explain the real and useful necessity that I have in mind I have to evoke the image of an unusual human being, that of the ordinary person, that rarest among human characters, the human being that lives in his age, that reacts spontaneously to what his age teaches him, who makes his life out of what his age does to him, who in no way has recourse to what has already been developed - a naked, whipped, daring human being, one who is ordinary because no queerness, no particular inclination or passion, no genius ear, nor genius eye, no genius love, no however beautiful eccentricity, seduces him away into the past, into peculiarity and into selfhood, a human being at the same time sufficiently chaste and sufficiently daredevil to achieve what is necessary, that which in his age is possible. I can make this clear by some verbal images. Somebody that plays Bach may be a great person and may be very useful to his students and listeners. But he can change nothing and he cannot hope to change anything. He cannot hope to do anything real. He is harmless and is, himself, helpless, does nothing by his playing to feed the hungry, to get rid of wrongs - I mean: to create joy beyond personal gain and personal enjoyment. Another, somebody in some Spanish village, a genuine flamenco player, listening to jazz in bars, seeing tourists, having cars in his head, no longer is a flamenco player: regardless of how beautifully he plays. He may still - suffering, pained, sorrowing for flamenco - be a genuine musician. But he is no longer a flamenco player in the grandeur of flamenco. He too can put something very beautiful and very valuable into the world, but he too can no longer help it, cannot live with it according to its demands.

Only the Ordinary Human Being can do that, the individual who is not protected by any particular love or by an age other than his own, who is forced to make music that is necessary - not only personally necessary, but the unique music resuming the age, possibly in the age, the one kind of music that might help.

I intend nothing pompous by this. Nor am I calling for a muse lightening the leisure time of the working class - though I like it better than that self-grafted, self-beautiful music that has made connection with the modern banking establishment. Every age, every person, has to find its music, its solution, no matter what, but in any event not politics or games, culture mongering or anything like that, but music, spirit, dance, language, image, religion, a norm, a law, a potential: its own structure and order, a salvation that can be achieved only in specific terms, out of this age, this present, a simple inwardness capable of life so that it can be of help in the external world.

This, I think, is clear. I know what fashion and philosophy have to say concerning it. I know this cherished ideal of a science able to milk everything, to spell out the detail of everything, to piece together anything. I have no answers for students. One can study anything.

I am speaking of a big opportunity and a real one - though it's not something that can be achieved routinely. That's why I prefer to put I this way: it has almost begun to come into being. A big effort might bring it into being. I mane our real "folklore," the practice of a possibly genuine spiritual life. It's practive [SIC]: for an order is never born from mere spirituality, from the circumlocution of something or from any interpretation, no matter how true. Only practice, only music, dance, language, image, only the practice of religion can give birth to religion.

For many this will sound like an attempt to save the honour of art - just an artistic idea. I am not going to try to correct that impression. I don't want by their own body to demonstrate to anybody who does not have the longing for it - and where is such a person, with such a longing, to be found anyway?! - what dance is: this primary, everyday, wasted capacity. And I have no desire to sharpen the eyes and ears of anybody who does not yearn for this so that their eyes and ears might regain their conscience, might acquire power. I am not speaking of art at all. For "art" refers to the same secondary state intended by the concept of folklore. Whatever else it refers to, "art" refers to a product pacified before it has come into existence, to the art work, a thing by tradition enshrouded in love, captured to serve a particular, exclusively personal function, a thing that to historians registers an absurd value, absurd because not projected into reality. I am speaking of the chaos that is rich in mercies, of life in the rough, of the reality-worked-into-life attaching to the old festivities. I am speaking of joy ("die Freude"). All that is spiritual is made of joy. What I am saying is that without such means as dance and music a really chosen and really real life is not possible. The opportunity that I am speaking of makes me shudder perceiving it. It devours all, admits of no superfluity, disallows Bach and Beethoven, Luther and Rilke, permits only one thing, the Whole, the Something in which all the mercies of old might come to life again. (I am not saying to stop reading Rilke, not to listen to Back anymore.) The art of folklore now achievable by us, the great improvisation, has no need to borrow from the past. But it has a thousand relationships of love, it knows the oldest times. It comes from a place in which any time a melody has been meaningful.

The manifesto, the imperative, that follows from this goes like this:

Forget the notes. Don't waste your hearing on training. Get together, three or four of you, and make the music, whether with chairs and mugs and spoons or with fiddles and flutes, let the structures come into being, absolve your service to the world made out of sound, make a mess, hear fugues, do nothing, hear the littlest units. There can be no other relationship to music any more than this: to lower it to the status of an ordinary activity. There are no longer any principles of selection, no limits, no scales. Only the moral criterion of utilizability is left us, the challenge to find a music intensifying and sanctifying all that is heard. For we are now making a useful music, a music whose order is the order of music, a music for a new world.

It is as of now possible to create something that will console for centuries of specialist art, centuries in which the highest human power was as though in waste guided into side channels, centuries of proud professional idiocy, centuries of human dilletantism. We can now do for real what has been made in pictures for the pictures only, we can now actually live expressionism: which was only a revolution useful to art dealers and art critics. We are dancers. We are expressionists. We are Christians, pagans, Buddhist, Jews, everything, we live the oldest life. We don't need the categories of history. Creativity is not to be found at the universities nor in the Heideggers, Adornos and Picassos. We all stem from countries and communities that have never yet dared live with their demons. We unleash our spirits.

- Translation by S.Brecht

THE PUPPET CHRIST, Peter Schumann, program note to the 1964 Spencer Memorial Church Easter show,

"We sometimes give you a piece of bread along with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking, eating, and offering bread were forgotten. The bread decayed and became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show and we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It is fun. It preaches sermons and it builds up a self-sufficient ritual where the actors try to raise their lives to the purity and ecstasy of the actions in which they participate.

Puppet theater is the theater of all means. Puppets and masks should be played in the street. They are louder than the traffic. They don't teach problems, but they scream and dance and hit each other on the head and display life in its clearest terms. Puppet theater is an extension of sculpture. Imagine a cathedral, not as a decorated and religious place, but as a theater with Christ and the saints and gargoyles being set in motion by puppeteers, talking to the worshippers, participating in the ritual of music and words.

Puppet theater is of action rather than dialogue. The action is reduced to the simplest dance-like and specialized gestures. Our ten-foot rod puppets were invented as dancers, each puppet with a different construction for its movement. A puppet may be a hand only, or it may be a complicated body of many heads, hands, rods and fabric. Our puppeteers double as musicians, actors and technicians."

The World Has to be Demonstrated A New
Responses to a questionnaire, 2nd International Student Theatre Festival, University of Wroclaw. In: Poland, March, 1970, WIN, July, 1970.

Q: What is the purpose of your puppet theater?

The power of bread is obvious. People are hungry. The job of bread baking involves baking the loaves well for chewing and digestion and making them available to everybody.
Puppeteers and artists never know for sure what they are good for and what their job does for other people. We want to join the breadbakers, make good bread and give it out for free.
The world in which we live seems to consist mainly of politics or the organizations of man. War and hunger have to be abolished, water, air and soil have to be brought back to life. And puppet shows don't feed hungry children.
But war is made by the mind and poverty and hunger exist through our inefficiencies.
Our mind is hungry, and Jesus says: man does not live from bread alone, but from puppet shows as well.
Our everyday language is silly and does not tell the truth. Language which speaks the truth has to be found in a puppet show, hardly any language at all, but the actions and dealings out of which human dialogue will be born.
What is the purpose of a puppet show? To make the world plain, I guess, to speak simple language that everybody can understand. To seize the listener, to persuade him to the new world. To spark the movement of the listener.

We do the listening with drums and bugles and grasshoppers and the quiet breathing of 500 spectators. We have joined the children's conspiracy against the boring adult life.

Q: How does your theater relate to the leftist movement?

We are gypsies, and we play puppet shows in all the streets of the world. History is the history of man oppressing man, or the story of politics succeeding over people. Revolutions have taken capital from oppressors. Social welfare has been invented. Bureaucracies have been established. In some places rent is cheap and coats are expensive, and in other countries coats are cheap and rent is expensive.
The world is meant to be a computer of comfort and solved politics with man as the primary ingredient, the boss and the vacationeer.

But the minds are dropping out, the peoples' guts are coming alive again, and we are all marching down 5th Avenue in New York City, demanding the end of the Pentagon. There is a lot of good marching going on right now. There are black marches and hungry marches and marches against evil housing. All the marching together makes for the movement. It's wake-up time in the world and we beat the cymbals.
Puppet theater is good for sidewalk story-telling, and it's good for making things large and visible. The movement has many speeches and theories on the wrongs of consumer society. A lot of that is lost and does not move anybody. Puppeteers are not theoreticians, they are practical people who play with children and test themselves with children, they have to speak with dolls and beasts with a few necessary words only. They have to learn to speak very slowly, to touch people cautiously in order to move them.

Q: What is important in your opinion?

The movement calls the change that it longs for revolution. But what is revolution? A machine-gun change of government? A class-struggle masterpiece that the youth of the West is going to apply and imitate?

The goals of civilization are suspect and peoples' aches and fancies are hardly represented in the program of the future. Our brains create tremendous machines of facilitation, but we die like dogs with only a few aunts and uncles slightly praying for us.
Our wishes are wild and cannot be compared with our comfort. Neither our body nor our soul has arrived at any conclusion of what is worth while. We only know, we want it more and feel it better, and that our hours are holy and that they belong to us.

We want our jobs to be fierce and nice, to be even with our habits, to be as happy as the sleeping with women. We demand a civilization that is human, where the suffering of the individual is embraced by the common care. The world has to be demonstrated anew. Men and women are stuck in the one-way development of our century. Violent changes and speeds have ridded us of old human skills. Our confidence is gone and in our great hurry we invent a lot of stuff that even our famous carnivorous stomachs cannot digest.
The importance of story-telling and puppetry is little in the face of hunger and mutilation. That little importance is important. The master plan of all the little importances together has a name: liberation, light, the good life.
We will build a circus and with the circus we will travel through small and big towns and in the circus we will demonstrate the whole world.

THE OLD ART OF PUPPETRY IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER
WITH EXCERPTS FROM THE RADICALITY OF THE PUPPER THEATER, 1990

A FIDDLE LECTURE BY P.SCHUMANN
BREAD & PUPPET 1993

Since the Gulf War, all of us, big ones or little ones, obscure or bright, live in the New World Order. This was announced by the then U.S. President and he must know. The strong punishing hand of the First World has created a wonderful sense of togetherness among the chosen, who are chosen by God and History to be in this position. We, the first ones, were wondrously confirmed in this our Firstness. And the political and the economical and the philosophical implications of our feeling of strength and righteousness are still to bear fruit. The miserable art of puppetry, whose existence is barely noticed by mighty politics and by its mighty custom-tailored culture, must nevertheless respond to this New World Order situation and reconsider the why and the how of its miserable existence.

The embarrassing question is: how can I use as many words as I am about to use about a subject matter which distinguishes itself by speechlessness? Because the art of puppetry is equipped with a sceptical itch against our normal over-employment of words. The utilitarian babblings, the self-confident life-affirming communications which adorn our lives are suspect to my ears, insofar as my ears are puppetry ears. Why? Because words have the tendency to fix our normally vascillating uncertainties in a handsome way, in a way which then permits us to use them with our famous human pragmatic decisiveness: use them for our own purposes. And since we are so eager to employ the world and the words which represent the world to our advantage, I must warn you that these words which I am assembling here in the name of puppetry are valid for a few seconds only, because during these few seconds our galaxy and its thousands of neighbor-galaxies are streaming across space at speeds of more than 400 miles per second pulled by the gravitational force of some huge undiscovered mass beyond the range of astronomic vision.

I repeat: puppet theater has a talent to manage without language! It actually seems to prefer the absence of speech over the explicit engagement of speech and with that it is distinctly different from the actor's theater. The function of language in puppet theater is one among other functions, whereas the actor's theater derives it's raison d'etre from language. This stinginess with words in puppet theater is there not for any particular esthetic logic but for a couple of very simple and earnest reasons: (1) The puppets themselves are mutes; (2) Even though they are American-born they are not part of the getting-at-each-other's-throat system of capitalism, which is a system that pits us against ourselves not only in the marketplace but in the realm of language as well.

Who owns language? Who succeeds to extract concrete results from it? Who manipulates it and manipulates us with it? The successfully married commercial and political interests which run and ruin our lives are what they are by the grace of words, by the grace of the manipulative strength of words. Any exploitation whatsoever, the exploitation of the biosphere as well as the exploitation of populations or populations within populations, has to be sold to us first. We have to buy it, as we say, and after we are well persuaded, yes, we buy it.

The fighting against language, the uprising against purposeful, capitalistic and deceptive language, is at the heart of any movement that counters the disaster which in genteel and sweet tones calls itself our government and claims to govern our traffic only, but in truth governs our souls as well.

Even the art of glorification, which until recently was reserved for God alone, is now exclusively available through companies whose specialty it is to glorify. The mutes of our profession, our puppets, who teach us silence, also teach us the language which protests silence, first in babblings and babytalk, in slow repetitive cries and calls which haphazardly progress to sentences and paragraphs - then in readings and collages of scraps of available language, newspaper language - this strange poetry of so-called information - all of these are part of the elementary schooling in the grade school of puppetry.

In the actor's theater language is the reflector of human thought and human trivia beefed up and put forward by the actors and their imitative efforts. Acting is an art that actors know from the growing-up practices of children, who mimic adults as their means of entering the world just as they mimic animals to cast off their fear of the wild. Unfortunately the actor lacks the child's sincerity at this game and has to replace the child's urgent need with gymnastics which seem to train his imitation muscles as well as his imitation personality problems. In any case, the actor's education is geared towards the intensification of the fakery which is supposed to transport the viewer over the gap of the missing reality.

It isn't this gap between made-up reality and real reality, though, which is so bothersome. It's the overly generous serving of intimacies, of suspiciously intimate intimacies, which is so disturbing about this profession, especially two types of intimacies: (1) bedroom intimacies, in which the art of copulation is demonstrated so heroically that you can't understand why you, the paying guest, are excluded from it; (2) the intimacy of pain, the inflicting and suffering of pain. Real pain in life is a relative of death, a terrorizer, usually a visitor of great consequence. The detailed imitated pain of actors makes a mockery of the vital forces which enable our nature to fight pain or submit to pain respectfully.

Sincere intimacy, if anything, seems to be an addictive spice with which the movie-industry - the most visible exponent of the art of acting - has modern humankind hooked. The carefully designed family schmalz of the recent presidential election campaign sells the candidate as effectively as the soap opera from which this schmalz is copied sells its margarine. Eventually the art of acting results in just that: the most glorious of all acting roles, the role of the leader of the First World (also known simply as: the world) performed so brazenly you might think it was real.

Remember, not long ago B.Brecht took a fresh look at the history of theater and realized that the above-mentioned psychological dilemma of the actor could be cured if the actor would be allowed to enjoy his art as the art of faking. And Brecht went to Hollywood and half-heartedly fought with Hollywood about this issue. But Hollywood understands very well the human weakness for perfect vacations, the desire to abandon ourselves and our unrewarding lives - the need for a pillow for our brain, which translates into an excuse for any brutality whatsoever, and Hollywood knows this tickling to which it treats us is not like any other tickling to which we treat ourselves; no, this tickling is an economic power of the first order and as such it has a mighty task, a New World Order task - a chance to dominate not only the world, but to dominate its thought and dreams as well.

By comparison puppetry is rather innocent and stupid and its New World Order as dangerous as the exaltation of the color green or as perilous as its alignment with the garbage which it cherishes. The participation of puppetry in an inarticulate or barely articulate and therefore not at every moment newly defined world is like membership in a world order which was not invented by Mr.Columbus and is the exact opposite of Mr.Bush's New World Order.

The things, the pictures and sculptures which are the meat of puppetry, exist in reference to this indefinite world order and are ordered by a strange ambition, namely: to provide the world with an unfragmented and uncontrollable large picture of itself, a picture that 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. Puppet theater does not only consist of things - it is overwhelmed by things and lives in this obsession. In its practices it knows the typical and otherworldly qualities of things and in its productions it remains indebted to them. And indeed the soul of things does not reveal itself so easily. What speaks out of a puppet's gesture is mostly uncontrollable and in any case is not suited for the specific targetting with which modern audiences are bombarded.

When the puppet is manufactured it gets its own complicated face which should not be degraded to serve the purposes of character and story. Precisely because of this distance from purpose the puppet can then interfere as an agent in its own right in stories which don't know about it and which it can then influence effectively.

What is this puppet theatrum mundi? It is certainly more than its encyclopaedic massiveness and more than the beautiful megalomaniacal wholeness of the world and more than all the bedrooms and kitchen of the world, and it includes the precious cabbages and the precious witchgrasses and the noble antelopes and the noble cockroaches of the world and it doesn't exclude the thousand shameful normalities which mean so little and whose little meanings are just as meaningful as the meaning of the whole world. This puppet theatrum mundi which is made possible through the special talents of puppets and the special grace of things, this puppet theatrum mundi derives from the magicians, from the time when art was votive art, and it is probably true to say that this puppet theatrum mundi never quite succeeded to be what it wanted to be, that this puppet theatrum mundi is as unfinished as it is ancient.

Our modern democratic suspicion against the arts in general is that they are hopelessly involved with themselves, that they suffocate from their own wisdom, from their confinement to their proper sphere of operation, that they starve from their success, from their accessibility. Why? Because their historically guaranteed innocence isn't all that innocent, because everybody's chief profession is now changed to that of consumer in a consumer-society - something we did not think we were capable of just a little while ago, but it happened to us, heaven knows how. Now consuming, which we are brought up to practice diligently from childhood on, is a priority over everything else, and that includes our holy cows and our holy arts.

Yes, the suspicion against our modern art productivity extends to our holy cows. The professed meaninglessness of some of the finest modern art is at best a charming distractor from the grim reality of this First World in which we and our arts are imbedded. Our sophistication tries but is unable to absolve us from any of the brutal sufferings which we co-commit as members of the rich club to which we pay our dues, a club which is disgusting to the gods and abhorrent to the big world which suffers from it.

Sculpture is not exempt from earthquakes, nor music from volcanoes, and by the same token none of the arts are exempt from politics. Naturally the theatrum mundi of puppetry is no medicine against the ordained Bureau of Consumption. We who don't really suffer so badly from our permanent over-consumption also don't need a medicine against it. What we need is very simple: a new world. And this New World is very necessary and because it is so very necessary it must also be possible - we hope - but the inexplicability of this New World and the unavailability of the language which it takes to extract its description from the prevailing circumstances are just as gigantic as its necessity.

And yet, I would like to repeat that the puppet theater with its yearning to be a theatrum mundi, cannot be entirely eaten up by the eating mechanism of our culture and therefore would be better off to specialize in its non-edibility instead of collaborating with the collaborators and gluttons. Why? Because the tortured world needs its solidarity whereas the consumer society world manages astonishingly well without it - solidarity not only with the tortured human world but solidarity also with the world which is tortured by humans, a world which our Judeo-Christian morality has taught us to regard as our property, a world in which we will eventually all have the honor to participate either as worms or as ashes.

The actor's theatre is legitimate and is therefore referred to as: legitimate theater. Puppet theater in the Western world has been illegitimate more often than not and is therefore referred to as: only puppet theater. The puppet theater's traditional exemption from seriousness and its quasi-asocial status acted also as its saving grace, as a negative privilege which allowed the art to grow. The habitual lament of modern puppeteers about their low and ridiculous status in society is unfortunately disrespectful of their own art or proves an impotent attempt to market their work as so-called serious art.

In the meantime our German puppet colleagues have come up with an ingenious solution to the social-status-problem of puppetry by re-baptising it: Figurentheater (theater of objects) - so that nobody will find them guilty of complicity with Kaspar, Punch or Petrushka. It's a sad fact but modern puppeteers strive to be part of the legitimate theater establishment. They want to get away from the obvious childishness, freshness, disrespectfulness and politics and away from the fresh air or the poisonous air of the streets, where such mixtures of blatant truths and outright blasphemies rightly belong.

The ridiculousness of puppet theater is a true ridiculousness and has nothing to do with humor. Humor wants to be humorous. But the ridiculous is ridiculous precisely because it wants to be serious and fails to be so: Why? Because it pits papermache against government, because it fights with wooden swords against status-quo-thinking-machines.

As a German I know this ridiculousness in a special way. The fact that Auschwitz was possible in spite of Bach has reduced Bach to ridiculousness, has demoted him, so to speak, to the level of puppetry. As a German I am naturally aware of the ridiculousness of the arts, aware of the fact that seriousness and other pompous opposites of the ridiculous have been forced to their knees - except - maybe, for the latest upsurge in the field of esthetics - where art prevails as the M.C. of the market economy, where art lives as one re-creative product among other re-creative products, wonderfully and almost as relevant as rollerblading.

Seventy years ago Kurt Schwitters said: I demand an immediate elimination of all evil! Yes! But when you start calling the evils by name and attacking them separately, you get easily lost and lose the spirit of this foolish imperative, which is not only dadaistic and eager to poke fun at our world-improvement ambitions, but is a trumpet call all the same.

And there is another aspect yet to the ridiculous, which is related to the freedom of fools and which makes it possible to treat sad and depressing and very sad and very depressing subjectmatters with a kind of cheerfulness - and I don't mean the inherent cheerfulness of our trade where everything is always decidedly too small or too big for the average two-to-six foot audience - the littleness indicating dwarfness and childlikeness and also the tendency to cutesify human foibles and the too-bigness a demonizing and overdimensionalizing of often no more than mediocre spirits - I am talking about a manufacturing cheerfulness in spite of cruel facts, a production mode in opposition to the lascivious realism of the movies which employ suffering itself for mercantile usefulness.

This cheerfulness derives from the same distancing with which puppeteers work automatically and which Mr.Brecht tried to elevate to a principle of intelligent theater-work. But there is more to it: e.g. the absence of calculation on behalf of a preconceived result, a healthy contempt for the pragmatic aiming for targets as in everyday marketschemes. (To hell with pragmatism!) Further: a serious argument with our pluralistic freedom, which Marcuse described as a comfortable, smooth, reasonable and democratic un-freedom.

But we, the puppeteers of the world, should break away, should move off, as the German puppeteer Hoelderlin said: understand the freedom to rise; or as the rooster said to the donkey in the Brementown Musicians: come along, something better than Death we find anywhere

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