Bread and Puppet Theater: Art as Cheap as Bread
Vermont
On a farm in the Northeast Kingdom town of Glover, Vermont, one of the most unusual artistic institutions in America has been making enormous puppets and radical politics since nineteen sixty-three.
Peter Schumann was a German-born sculptor and dancer who arrived in New York City in the early nineteen sixties and almost immediately began making theater in the streets. He named the company Bread and Puppet because of two principles: that art should be as essential to human life as bread, and that puppets were the oldest, most direct form of performance. At early shows on the Lower East Side, Schumann baked sourdough bread and shared it with audiences before the performance. He still does.
The company became a defining voice of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Schumann's signature was scale: puppets ten, twenty, sometimes thirty feet tall, white-faced, slow-moving, operated by teams of performers. His nineteen sixty-eight piece called Fire, a wordless pageant depicting the atrocities of the war, ended with a Vietnamese woman dying in allegorical self-immolation. It toured internationally and became one of the defining works of political theater in the twentieth century.
Schumann moved Bread and Puppet to Vermont in the early nineteen seventies and settled on a Glover farm in nineteen seventy-five. Through the nineteen eighties, the annual Domestic Resurrection Circus drew tens of thousands of people to this rural hillside every August, an outdoor pageant of puppetry, acrobatics, and political commentary. In nineteen eighty-four, Schumann published the Cheap Art Manifesto, insisting that art should not be a privilege of museums and the rich but available to everyone. Bread and Puppet has sold art for as little as ten cents.
Schumann is in his nineties and still working. The farm in Glover houses a museum of thousands of puppets and masks. Performances continue every summer, still featuring homemade sourdough, still free or close to it, still angry about the things that made Schumann angry sixty years ago.
