Bread and Puppet Theater

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The Bread and Puppet Theater performed during a Domestic Resurrection Circus in the 1980s

The Bread and Puppet Theater is an American theater group that makes use of the means of puppet theater and can be assigned to the genre of political theater . The outstanding feature of the collective is the use of masks and large dolls up to five meters high, which can be moved like stick figures . Since the main venues are public places, the collective is considered a typical street theater .

In terms of the type of artistic work, the content of the pieces and the level of awareness, the Bread and Puppet Theater can be compared to the Living Theater , in whose premises it initially appeared. It was close to the culture of off-off Broadway .

history

Puppets in the Museum of the Theater in Glover, Vermont

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in New York City in the early 1960s by the German Peter Schumann . The theater has been based on a former farm and dairy farm in Glover , which is located in the US state of Vermont and about 25 miles south of the Canadian border , since 1974 . The doll museum, which was set up in 1963, has also been located there since 1998.

It sees itself as “a permanent workshop for sculpture, pantomime , dance, storytelling and making and playing dolls, music and making instruments. The participants move from production to production, between 2 and 100 actors, pantomimes, musicians, puppeteers. Often children also take part in the production [...] “The name of the theater group is derived from their custom of offering the audience freshly baked bread during performances. The name symbolically stands for “ bread and games ” and for the motto “ bread and roses ”. The content of the theater productions is based on (daily) political issues that are examined for Christian and religious points of contact.

The theater had its first performance in 1961 with the play Dance of Death in New York's Judson Memorial Church. In 1963 Schumann supported the anti-war movement against the Vietnam War with a happening in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral . In protest against the cardinal's blessing of the crew of B-52 bombers , the theater opened in front of the church under the motto “Napalm Jesus Baby”. During the action, the masks from an earlier Christmas performance were placed on long sticks and held up.

In 1967 the theater troupe was discovered by a French talent scout performing their play Fire . He invited her to a festival in Nancy in 1968, where her game was very well received. Appearances in major European cities such as Paris, London and Berlin followed. In 1969 a nine-month tour through Europe followed, which freed Peter Schumann from his financial problems. After returning to the USA around 1970, the theater received an invitation from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, to settle on a farm. The only condition was to include the students and lecturers in his productions. Peter Schumann accepted and moved to Vermont with his wife and five children. In 1974 the theater moved to the farm in Glover, where it is still located today.

The following topics have emerged over the years:

Performances from 1961 to 1998

  • 1961 First staging and world premiere of the Dance of Death in New York's Judson Memorial Church
  • 1962 Foundation of the Bread and Puppet Theater on the Lower East Side of New York
  • 1962–1963 tour with dance of death through various schools and colleges; other productions: The Christmas story, Feuer ( Fire, 1st version)
  • 1963–1966 establishment of the Bread and Puppet Museum in New York; further tours and productions
  • 1965 construction of the doll “Uncle Fatso” (representing the USA and western capitalism); Performance of The Pied Piper of Hameln with about 50 children
  • 1966 first highlight with the piece Fire, in which three Americans were honored who had killed themselves in protest against the Vietnam War
  • 1968 The Battle of the Giant Dolls in New York's Central Park; Samples for The Bible; Further performances of Fire and first tour to Europe (Amsterdam, London and Berlin) with Fire, A dead stands up and A man says goodbye
  • 1969 first performances of the now famous piece The cry of the people to feed ( The Cry of the People for Meat), based on the play The Bible, in which the characters always used by "Uncle Fatso," "The Vietnamese lady", " The great warrior ”as well as“ God of Heaven ”and“ Mother Earth ”appear; second European tour with performances in Nancy, Rome, Turin, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Wroclaw and Amsterdam
  • In 1970 part of the group, including Schumann and his family, moved to Plainfield / Vermont and installed the Theater in Residence with students; Work on and performances by Tristan and Isolde
  • 1971 Participation in the large anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, DC with hundreds of dolls, flags, a music band and about a hundred other players; Performance of The 14 Stages of the Cross in front of the Capitol; Rehearsals for The Bird Catcher in Hell ( The Bird Catcher in Hell) after a Japanese fairy tales, Homer's Iliad and the infamous speech Richard Nixon , in this account of the My Lai massacre accused Lieutenant William Calley was trying to take into custody
  • 1971–1972 further European tour with 17 players and performances in theaters, schools, churches and prisons in Basel, Zurich, Bonn, Stockholm, Hamburg, Warsaw, Nancy, Paris and in a bank in Frankfurt am Main; meanwhile, members of the group who remained in the USA performed several pieces by the Bread and Puppet; intensive agricultural work on her farm after her return; Works on and performances from Coney Island Circus
  • Extensive European tours in 1974/75 and 1976
  • 1989 The Same Boat: The Passion of Chico Mendes
  • 1991 Participation in the “ Theater der Welt ” festival in Essen with the play The New World Order
  • Organizer of the Domestic Resurrection Circuses and Pageants annually until 1998, where the pieces were created:
    • 1993 Convention of the Gods
    • 1998 Gates of Hell

Activities from 1998

Theater founder Peter Schumann during the project " Republic Free Wendland - Reactivated" 2010 in Hanover
Demonstration during the project "Republic Free Wendland - Reactivated"

The theater appeared, for example, during the Yugoslav war in Sarajevo and during protests against the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. During a performance in 2000 for the Republican National Convention , which George W. Bush nominated, 79 people were arrested and ill-treated, including numerous puppeteers. Dolls were also confiscated and destroyed. In December 2005 the play Theater for The New City was performed in New York. In 2006 a workshop event for puppetry “apprentices” was held in Glover.

Between 1975 and 1998, the annual Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant took place on the farm in Glover (German: "domestic resurrection circus"). It was a free summer festival at which Peter Schumann and his core group held workshops, courses and seminars in the open air over two days.

During the Expo 2000 in Hanover in 2000, the Bread and Puppet Theater took part in the parade of groups of performers on the festival site almost every day for the first few weeks.

Incident in 1998

The 1998 Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant was about the 150th birthday of the Communist Manifesto and Brecht's 100th birthday. For this purpose, an open-air performance with several hundred people was developed and performed, in which Schumann appeared on stilts over 3 meters high. On August 19, 1998, Schumann announced the temporary end of these actions. Participants had previously brought dogs and drugs onto the site, several dozen visitors were hospitalized because of the heat exposure, but mostly drug abuse, and a 41-year-old man was killed in a fight at the nearby campground. In addition, the annually growing number of spectators and participants with up to 40,000 visitors in the 1990s increasingly exceeded the capacities of the organizers. Peter Schumann, as the responsible manager, said: "We're not going away, we're going to hold smaller forms of theater here on our bread-and-puppet farm in the summer."

Since then, instead of a big festival, the Bread and Puppet Circus has performed on the weekends during the summer months.

  • 2006 bus of the group in Rochester, New York

  • Bread and Puppet Circus with band in August 2009

  • In 2009 the motto was "Dirty Cheap Money Circus"

  • Addressing the Operation Enduring Freedom in 2009

effect

The Bread and Puppet Theater is still active through performances, seminars, and occasional promotions, as well as its students and pupils. The collective is pioneering in the connection between the public and theater. With the abolition of the separation between living and working and the later inclusion of agriculture, it is also a model of alternative and self-determined ways of life.

In an interview with CBC Radio One, Schumann himself sums up that puppetry is able to “save the world from itself with an unfragmented and uncontrollable large picture, a picture that only puppetry can draw, a picture that can be drawn simultaneously can pray and attack, a theatrum mundi that includes the world's desire to be what it could be. "

Works

  • Peter Schumann: puppets and masks. The Bread and Puppet Theater. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-436-01774-4 (the text and many photos deal almost exclusively with the play The Bird Catcher in Hell, the complete text of which is printed)

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Bread and Puppet Theater  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c The Bread and Puppet Theater (sic!) In Theaterlexikon. Henschelverlag Art and Society, 2nd edition, Berlin 1977, p. 74
  2. ↑ a b Peter Schumann: Dolls and masks, no page number
  3. ↑ Stefan Brecht, p. 166, says, however, that the first performance of the theater group, which initially consisted of about five people, was a children's performance on November 17, 1963.
  4. ↑ For a detailed chronology from 1961 to 1973 see Peter Schumman: Puppen und Masken
  5. ^ John Bell: Puppets, masks, and performing objects, p. 2
  6. ↑ See the statement of the theater on the incidents during the Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant of 1998 (English)

Coordinates: 44 ° 41 ′ 3 "  N , 72 ° 10 ′ 40.7"  W.