photo by Ronald T. Simon There is something about the art of puppet theater and something completely different about the puppet arts as done by Bread and Puppet Theater.
There is a great book about Bread and Puppet titled: Rehearsing with Gods by Ronald Simon and Marc Estrin and published by Chelsea Green.
The book chronicles the concepts and movements of the theatre over the years- but it is the over all concept of the troupe's work with puppet's to further the basic needs of our culture that is most fulfilling and most entertaining.
I visited the farm/theater/museum in Glover VT. That's where the photo of the zebra and the trash cans comes from; from the cheap art bus gallery/store that was there when I visited.
I took in the circus that they performed in their new barn built for the events- it is hard to describe the performance because for me it was one of those rare occasions when theater has expanded my consciousness toward, and right up to, a unity experience. Stuffed onto bleachers erected at one end of the barn, cramped and hot, the performers indulge in the main space and the band fits in on the side. And as if channelling everything that is Waiting for Godot and turning it into the essential revolutionary gesture that fits into a barn in Vermont, the performance hovered between iconoclastic defiance and domestic enchantment- between slapstick and ballet.
What I experienced sitting in the audience was the growing feeling that all the pageantry and display and poetry was fitted and found within the context of the great North East Kingdom and the outstretched nation that seems to tumble down from the ridges and run west. The performance was as if an anchor- both symbolically as is the theater's goal to point out, and establish in our awareness, follies both personal and communal and as an anchor for all work and progress evolving toward truth.
There is something in the human/mythic quality in the puppet that I often see in quilts- the strong narrative force matched to the human utility of the object's use. The unity experience that I had in Glover is not unlike the knowing feeling that is created in applied art objects. One transcends when looking at a quilt because of its mix of the complex and the simple. It is both a shelter and it is an object of art that is decorative, pictorial, and narrative. A quilt transcribes the path of its creation and it fixes that patchwork process into a unified wholeness.
At the Bread and Puppet farm, before performances, you stand outside the theater and they raise a flag honoring some aspect of the domestic, a broom, a chair, etc. the small flag has a picture of a broom on it, it's raised up onto a spindly, rough-hewn flag pole. There is a drum-roll as the flag is raised and when it reaches the top someone blows a "ta-da" on the horn and the cast of the theater all say something like: "The Broom." And then everyone goes inside for the show.
