Happy Birthday, Bread & Puppet: 50 years of political activism and stunning pageantry [View all]

[cali]

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In this introduction, Schumann listed the enduringly challenging themes of the Vermont-based experimental, political mask and puppet theater as it arrives in town at the start of the company’s 50th year.

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It’s followed by a new companion piece, The Possibilitarians, an epic and raucous pageant addressing 17th century English radicals called the Diggers who planted parsnips, carrots and beans on common land as they sought to found a society of greater equality and without private land ownership. This was much to the displeasure of local manor lords, who harassed them and defeated them through courts and by force within a few years

“Quite meaningful even though not many concrete results come of it,” Schumann told the audience. But here the theater mulls parallels to the Occupy Wall Street movement, looking backward to consider ways to challenge inequity now.

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Bread and Puppet moved to northern Vermont in 1970, where it produced “Our Domestic Resurrection Circus,” a two-day outdoor festival of serious puppet shows, satirical circuses, and poetic pageants featuring casts of hundreds annually through 1998. Attendance each year grew to as much as 30,000. The theater’s history is told in the troupe’s barn museum (free admission), filled with tableaus of cardboard and papier-mâché characters, in Glover, Vermont. Holland Cotter of the New York Times has called it “One of the great sights of American art.”

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http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/26/bread-puppet-schumann

If you've never seen their work, there are lots of vids on youtube

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Puppet_Theater

https://www.google.com/search?q=Bread+and+Puppet&hl=en&gl=us&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=exKrUd7LJKPG0QH7koCIAw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1270&bih=510