Mar 6-8, 2009
The Bread and Puppet Institute for Subversive Paper Maché offers lessons in state-of-the-art street-theater technology.
You can learn (1) how to launch precision attacks on war and capitalist megalomania, (2) how to get the quickest, cheapest response to horrifically expensive dilemmas, and (3) how to make cardboard politicians, picture stories (cantastoria), hand puppets, giants, and noisy garbage for rallies, parades, and the like.
Bread & Puppeteers will conduct three simultaneous workshop sessions. (1) Cantastoria – the ancient form of story telling combining text, movement, music, and painting; (2) Kasper Masks - the stars of the Rotten Idea Theater Company, named after a fresh German character, very much like Punch, who likes to thumb his nose at the big guys; and (3) Junk instruments – they make glorious music and are made from stuff found in the garbage. It’s free! It’s everywhere!
Workshop participants will rotate through the three activities. We’ll all meet together at the end of the Institute to share what we accomplished.
On Saturday night Peter Schumann will lead a session on the past, present, and future of the Bread & Puppet Theater. The workshop will be run by the Bread & Puppet’s resident company of 5-7 puppeteers.
The Bread & Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand-puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of that neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed in which sculpture, music, dance, and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community. Many performances were done in the street. During the Vietnam War, Bread & Puppet staged block-long processions involving hundreds of people. In 1970 they moved to Vermont as theater-in-residence at Goddard College, combining puppetry with gardening and bread baking in a serious way, learning to live in the countryside, and letting themselves be influenced by the experience. In 1974 the Theater moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year-old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Its Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two-day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998. The company makes its income from touring new and old productions here and abroad and from the sales of Bread & Puppet Press’s posters and publications. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company to extensive outdoor pageants that require the participation of many volunteers. Bread & Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in this country.