[Bob Morris’s article on Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater ran in the New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section on 20 August 2023; it was reported from Glover, Vermont, Bread and Puppet’s longtime home base.
[Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Lüben, Silesia, which was then part of Germany (in 1945, it was returned to Poland). In 1945, just before the end of World War II, his family fled to Germany and they eventually settled in West Berlin in the early ’50s and Peter finished his education there.
[He worked in sculpture, graphics, and dance in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and, moving to Munich, he founded a dance company. He met a young Russian-born American woman who was studying in Munich, and in 1959, they were married.
[In 1961, he moved to the United States with his wife, Elka, and together they founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City on the Lower East Side in 1963. In 1970, the Schumanns moved to a farm in Glover, Vermont, and reestablished Bread and Puppet there, where it’s been based for 53 years. (Elka Schumann died in 2021; her obituary is posted below, following “He’s Still Kneading Art.”]
“HE’S STILL
KNEADING ART, AND SOURDOUGH RYE”
by Bob Morris
But Peter Schumann’s is 89. What happens to Bread and Puppet Theater when he’s gone?
Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.
“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.
In July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.
Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.
In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.
“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.
Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.
Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.
Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.
“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”
The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021 [see her obituary below], on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)
But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?
“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.
“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”
Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.
Inside a barn last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.
Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.
“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.
“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”
He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.
With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.
“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”
“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.
“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”
John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.
“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.
That seems an understatement.
At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”
After that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.
Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.
“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”
In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.
Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.
“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”
He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.
“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.”
[Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and is the author of Assisted Loving (Harper, 2008) and Crispin the Terrible (Callaway Editions, 2000). He’s written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Southampton Review, Town and Country, and other publications, and has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. He also collaborated with actress Diahann Carroll on her award-winning memoir, Diahann Carroll in Conversation with Bob Morris (Audible Audiobook; Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2009).
[I’ve written a great deal about experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) on this blog. Shapiro came to New York City often as a young teenager, hitchhiking from his boarding school in Massachusetts in the early 1960s. The young theater novice encountered Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater at that time, and they became a significant influence on the nascent theater artist.]
*
* * *
“ELKA SCHUMANN, 85, ANTICAPITALIST MATRIARCH
[Elka Leigh Schumann, Peter’s wife of 62 years and the co-founder of Bread and Puppet, died at 85 on 1 August 2021. Her New York Times obituary ran in section B (“Business”/”Sports”) on 12 August 2021 (updated online 3 September 2021).]
She and her husband ran a Vermont-based troupe that has taken on social and political issues in productions featuring enormous puppets.
Elka Schumann, who with her husband, Peter, ran the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, known for its countercultural messaging through avant-garde puppeteering, died on Aug. 1 in a hospital in Newport, Vt. She was 85.
The cause was a stroke, her son Max Schumann said.
As its name suggests, the Bread and Puppet Theater is dedicated to two types of art: baking and puppetry. Fresh sourdough bread, milled and baked by Mr. Schumann, was distributed to troupe members and the audience while monstrous papier-mâché puppets, propelled by actors inside them, told stories that took on social and political causes like housing inequality and antiwar and anti-draft activism.
Among the recurring characters was the troupe’s first antagonist, Uncle Fatso, whose roles included a slumlord and allegorical representations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The troupe’s productions included renditions of plays by the leftist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and shows based on the diaries of the anarchist Emma Goldman.
The critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a visit to Bread and Puppet Theater in 2007 as surreal, “an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle experience.”
The Schumanns ran their operation out of a farm in Glover, Vt., in the northeast part of the state, and toured the country in a sky-blue school bus with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun painted on it. The company made a point of putting on shows in underserved communities and involving children from there in making costumes and sometimes performing.
But the troupe was best known for its annual festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a puppet-dense two-day Woodstock-like affair with a pageant, a parade and politically bent skits about climate change, global consumerism and nuclear annihilation. For many years the event, “a countercultural spectacle,” drew crowds of nearly 40,000 and was the troupe’s main source of funding, John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, wrote in a paper.
The Resurrection Circus started in 1970 but abruptly ended in 1998 after a fight broke out on the grounds resulting in a man’s death.
Ms. Schumann was an avowed anticapitalist, and the farm in Glover, complete with livestock and a maple-sugaring operation, became her own quasi-society operating on socialist principles. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.
She also managed the Bread and Puppet Press, which distributed pamphlets, broadsheets and posters delivering political and cultural commentary. In a manifesto titled “Why Cheap Art,” which Ms. Schumann printed on posters, her husband wrote: “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you.”
It continued: “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!”
Elka Leigh Scott was born on Aug. 29, 1935, one of two girls, in Magnitogorsk, a city in Russia about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Her mother, Maria Ivanova (Dikareva) Scott, was a teacher. Her father, John Scott, was an American who worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. Her parents had supported the Russian Revolution.
When Elka was young, as German forces invaded, the family fled the country, taking a train to Japan and an ocean liner to Hawaii before continuing on to San Francisco. They lived for a time in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City and spent four years in Berlin after the war before returning to the United States in 1949, settling in Ridgefield, Conn.
Elka attended Ridgefield High School for three years before transferring to the private Putney School in Vermont, where her grandfather Scott Nearing, a prominent left-wing economist, was a lecturer. She went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in art history in 1958.
In a 2016 oral history with the Vermont Historical Society, Ms. Schumann said that her first years at Bryn Mawr were somewhat disappointing: Her classmates spent more time darning socks for their boyfriends than anything else.
In her junior year she studied abroad in Munich, where she met Peter Schumann. They married in 1959 and had five children while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they started the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963. The heated political climate of the ’60s made the couple’s work more urgent.
Some of the company’s first performances were street parades and protests supporting rent strikes and the labor movement. One protest involved Mr. Schumann parading a puppet of Jesus in Manhattan holding a sign that simply said, “Vietnam.”
The family moved to Plainfield, Vt., in 1970, and lived on a farm there, owned by Goddard College, for four years until Ms. Schumann’s father purchased the Glover farm that became Bread and Puppet’s home, complete with a museum.
In addition to her son Max, Ms. Schumann is survived by her husband; another son, Salih; three daughters, Solvieg, Tamar and Tjasa Maria Schumann; five grandchildren; and her sister, Elena Scott Whiteside.
In 2001, Tamar Schumann and the activist DeeDee Halleck made a documentary film titled “AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet.”
Ms. Schumann was buried in a pine grove on the farm.
[Anabelle Willams was an obituaries fellow at the New York Times from June 2021 to June 2022, She’s currently publishing editor at the Wall Street Journal.]
* *
* *
“DRAMATURGY AND THE THEATER OF MASKS AND
PUPPETS”
by John Bell
[This essay by the dramaturg of the Bread and Puppet Theater was originally published in volume I, number 3 (Winter 1988-89) of the LMDA Review, the journal of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas).]
If defining the job of the dramaturg in our present American theater is sometimes difficult because so many people in the theater have little understanding of the need for or function of that occupation, it should be apparent that explaining the function of dramaturgy in theaters of masks and puppets is that much more difficult because those theatrical techniques are in general so little analyzed and thus so little understood. But there is an important role for dramaturgy in theaters that use masks, puppets, and other performing objects, and I would like to attempt an explanation of that role by exploring the formal necessities of mask and puppet theater, and then specifically focusing on the dramaturgy of one example of this performance style, the Bread and Puppet Theater.
There is an implicit difference of approach between the theater of masks and puppets and the theater of actors, and that difference can be clarified by considering the possible meanings of dramaturgy. In relation to the theater of actors and dramatic literature, dramaturgy exists as liaison between dramatic text (the primary source) and that text’s transfer to the stage. But another aspect of dramaturgy is possible, one that includes a more general concern with the art of theatrical representation that in the theater of masks and puppets is based on the movement of those performing objects. The first rehearsal of a production of dramatic literature is a reading of the script by actors, while the first rehearsal of a mask or puppet production is probably one of movement of particular objects by performers in a particular space. While a dramaturgy of images and a dramaturgy of language are essential to productions of both theatrical forms, these two dramaturgies appear with opposite emphasis in each. But an understanding of both is essential, not only in order to work with today’s theaters of objects and images, but to understand where these various stage languages had their precedents.
Text and the Theater of Objects
Although the various theaters of masks and puppets around the world, which we shall categorize (with the possibility of including other theaters) as theaters of performing objects, generally utilize language they do so in ways often essentially different from the manner in which dramatic text tends to be used today on most American stages. While language in the theater of dramatic literature is based on the playwright’s script, language in the theater of objects by tradition often involves the following features: narration or a narrator as opposed to dialogue or actors in conversation; epic as opposed to Aristotelian form; improvisation as opposed to fidelity to a certain text; poetry in preference to prose; and oral rather than written transmission of text.
As popular theaters often falling under the quasi-scientific purview of folklore and anthropological study, traditional theaters of objects are (rightfully) seen in relation to the storytellers of community history. That is to say, the content of traditional mask and puppet productions often has to do with the legacy, cultural history, and the origin of the community in which the theater belongs. Consequently, individual productions of (for example) Javanese theater, Indian puppet and mask theaters or Sicilian marionette theater have to do with episodes in the mythological or idealized history of the Javanese, Indian, or Italian people, much in the same manner that Greek tragedies and comedies (mask theaters) referred to stories of Greek epic history, the Ordo prophetorum [sic] of European medieval theater certified the historical rectitude of Christianity, and Shakespeare’s history plays explained England’s past to the Elizabethans.
[The Ordo Prophetarum, or Procession of the Prophets, was a drama that was part of the 12th-century rituals celebrated during the festival of Christmas Eve. In this liturgical representation the arrival of the Messiah is narrated by the characters carved in the temple of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, accompanied by the instruments that appear sculpted in the Portico of Glory.]
In the traditional theaters of performing objects an episode of the epic is presented, improvised upon and made to comment on present-day occurrences. In south Indian Andhra Pradesh shadow theater, for example, a typical performance presents one episode from the Mahabharata [a major Sanskrit epic of ancient India, principally compiled in the 3rd century BCE-4th century CE, revered in Hinduism]. The audience judges the performance according to the skill the performers show in presenting variations or improvisations on the theme of the particular episode. Comic characters having little to do with the main story are utilized to comment on current events in the community. The basic language of the performance is the poetry of some orally received version of the Mahabharata memorized with the aid of regular verse and rhyme patterns.
We should compare this to the very different technique through which that same epic was interpreted by Peter Brook in his version of the Mahabharata [1985; Brooklyn, NY: 13 October 1987-3 January 1988] which, Brook’s innovative performance methods (often involving performing objects) aside, inevitably depends on fidelity to Jean-Claude Carriere’s script. In both versions language is at the center of the work, but in quite different forms according to the different functions each theater performs for the communities in which the works are staged—in one case the story of a community in and for that community, in the other a work of modern art for the specific community of modern culture consumers.
Not all theaters of objects. of course, are constructed on the epic form. Japanese Noh [a heavily formalized masked theater form] and Bunraku [puppet theater employing doll puppets] theaters depend quite clearly on the exact transmission of a written play script but the way in which they do shows another different function of text in the theater of performing objects, the separation of theatrical elements. This separation, one of the clearest examples of what Brecht termed verfremdungseffekt, is an essential aspect of the theater of objects in which movement, sound (spoken or sung text and music) and light are all presented separately to the audience, which then performs the active receptive function of combining those elements during the performance. Thus, in Bunraku theater, one can variously choose to watch the puppets themselves, the operators, or the chanter and samisen player who present a musicalized version of the text.
An emphasis on oral tradition as opposed to written text in some theaters of objects has three aspects relevant to our discussion of dramaturgy. First, the fact of oral transmission in non-literate cultures obviously negates the power of written text (although certainly not at all the power of the language of the poetry itself, the memory of which is of the utmost importance), and full written texts often first appear, as was the case with Commedia dell’Arte or the French Guignol theater, as the after-the-fact remembrances of the performers or folklorist observations by writers uninvolved with the productions. Secondly, the element of improvisations circumvents the need for a script as the performers become on-the-spot playwrights (although we do know that improvisations have their own rules and forms). Third, as we might infer from the preceding elements, there is a corresponding necessity of a dramaturg of images at work in the theater of objects that involves the understanding of mask and puppet languages of movement (various lazzi of the Commedia theater, for example) and are traditionally handed down orally, sometimes along with the texts, from one generation of performers to the next, but which now, especially in modern western theaters, tends to be created anew with new techniques. It is that modern and postmodern re-discovery of the theaters of masks, puppets, and performing objects, from the avant-garde of the beginning of this [the twentieth] century (Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists in particular) to the recent works of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Squat Theater, Theodora Skipitares, Lee Breuer, and the Bread and Puppet Theater that makes an understanding of the dramaturgy of performing objects necessary.
A Contemporary Dramaturgy of Performing Objects
One of these theaters that bases its work on the dramaturgy of performing objects is Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, now entering its twenty-fifth year of existence [as of 1988; it’s now in its sixtieth year]. I would like to explain how this theater uses dramaturgy of text and dramaturgy of image in its productions, and begin by looking at the process of the initial choices necessary to begin work on any particular production. In the case of Bread and Puppet, these choices, following the initial selection of theme, involve space and performing objects in that space. The theater space, whether it is a proscenium stage (from a hand-puppet booth to a full-size theater), a circus ring, a 25-acre outdoor space, or a street site for procession implies certain restrictions for effective theater having to do with scale and design—giant figures might not work inside a small theater, and small two-dimensional figures will not be effective in a large-scale space with a surrounding audience. More important are questions about the make-up of the ensemble of performing objects—i.e., masks alone, masks with puppets, puppets, puppets alone and the relative size and scale of each. In the visually-strong theater of objects, color is also of immense importance. The introduction of red, for example, in a show with a basically black and white color scheme (e.g., Bread and Puppet’s recent Life and Death of a Fireman [1987]) has an immense effect as important to this theater as the recitation of a strong soliloquy is to a Shakespeare play. Finally, the design of the performing objects will determine their use and range of possible movements in any particular production, a factor the same for a theater like Bread and Puppet as it was for the classic Greek drama, which fact an Italian director discovered when mounting a production of Menander’s fourth century B.C. comedy Samìa [The girl from Samos/La Donna di Samo; dir. Mario Prosperi, 1979, 1981] with masks based on recently discovered [1973] originals. “Each mask,” the director realized, “wants to be ‘animated’ in its own way . . . [.] The actor must conform to the authority of a code [of movement for each mask].” (Mario Prosperi, “The Masks of Lipari,” TDR 26:4 [Winter 1982] T96, p. 35).
The function of text in Bread and Puppet Theater generally falls into one of two categories. At times, a prewritten text will serve as a structural element in a Bread and Puppet production, oftentimes as a libretto in a music-based piece as in recent theatrical productions of Mozart’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. On rare occasions, a script is utilized from the beginning, as was the case with a 1981 production of Büchner’s Woyzeck. But generally texts are selected and utilized as part of the production’s process, and finalized as scripts (if ever) after the show has been constructed. Text in these productions is often the result of a type of collective dramaturgy the likes of which was attempted in Berlin by the Piscator-Bühne in the late [nineteen-] twenties and used more successfully by the Federal Theatre’s “Living Newspaper” in New York in the late thirties. An aspect of Bread and Puppet’s two-day-long annual Domestic Resurrection Circus is an intensive period of research by various participants in the event on the Circus’s particular (and usually political) topic: the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution (1987), the Politics of Hunger (1986), Bach and Nicaragua (1985), etc. In other production situations—workshop/productions, for example—Bread and Puppet employs a similar approach to collective playwriting based on the participants’ experiences. In the spring of 1987 the texts for The Passion of San José de Masatepe, created and performed at Easter time in the Nicaraguan village of the show’s title, were written as collaborative reflections of the workshop participants (members of the campesino [farmworker] cultural organization MECATE) as a contemporary biblical exegesis based on Liberation Theology.
More often than, or in combination with, specifically written text the Bread and Puppet Theater utilizes “found” text as an element of a production. Thus for the 1987 Domestic Resurrection Circus sections of the U.S. Constitution were juxtaposed with an earlier American constitution, the Iroquois Nation’s Kaianerokova [sic; Kaianerekowa, the Iroquois Great Law of Peace; thought to date from the late 12th century (ca. 1190)]. For The Story of Ben Linder [1959-1987], a political street show on the life and death of the young American engineer killed by the contras [a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U.S. government] in Nicaragua, a combination of newspaper accounts, Congressional testimony, Linder’s letters, original dialogue and rhymed couplets, and an Appalachian folk song were all employed as textual means to tell Linder’s story as a Dance of Death. Finally, in addition to texts spoken or sung, by narrators, in dialogue, or in choruses, Bread and Puppet employs the visual effect of written text, as signs identifying characters, or in the case of longer texts, as the physical presence of a comment on a particular scene.
This brief effort has, I hope, served to outline the general nature of dramaturgy (of image and of text) in what night be the most widespread style of live theater in the world—the theater of masks, puppets, and performing objects, and to assert that although texts (and therefore the nature of that theater’s dramaturgy) are employed differently there than in theaters of dramatic literature, dramaturgy itself (and hence someone performing a dramaturgical function) is an essential element of that theater.
[I direct readers to my two-part post “A History of Dramaturgy,” published on Rick On Theater on 31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023.
[John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts, both at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, and was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1971 to 1985, where he was, among other positions, the company’s dramaturg.
[Bell received his doctoral
degree in theater from New York City’s Columbia University and is the author of
many books and articles about puppet theater, an editor of Puppetry International, a founding member of the
Brooklyn-based theater collective Great Small Works, one of the creators of the
Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts, and a member of the Second Line Social Aid
and Pleasure Society Brass Band of
Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
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