Art as sacrament
Great political artists require great political events. The tragedies of 9/11, the Iraq War, indefinite detentions, and American torture fertilized major Bread and Puppet shows. They come back to me as a series of haunting, mournful, acid images: a bomb served to tuxedoed gents at a banquet table; Iraqi women carrying corpses through a forest; a body falling from a balcony and thumping onstage; twin buildings made of naked bodies shattered by an airplane made of naked bodies; a ship of soldiers sailing in quest of victory; a great white bird (a kite on poles carried by three runners) flying across a green field; a giant puppet climbing into the air, its body a banner illustrating a tale of gods destroying humanity from the Mayan Popol Vuh. This past winter, Schumann re-imagined Dante’s Inferno as a scene from Guantánamo — a narrator read an interrogation transcript while performers played with little puppets and banged a hammer.
The theater is a mix of lectures, papier-mâché sculptures, banners, music, experimental dance, seriousness, and humor — an integration of all arts. What sticks with me are the odd alchemical moments that leap over logic directly into emotion. The “bread” of the company’s name refers to home-baked loaves smeared with garlic aioli that it serves after each show. It signals the theater as ritual sacrament, as spiritual nourishment.
The theater’s influence is vast — from giant puppets that are now standard at street protests to the many companies that Bread and Puppet alums have founded across the Americas and Europe. Its most mainstream manifestation is in the shows of Julie Taymor, who briefly hung out with the theater in the early ’70s. (She stuck a soulless clone of the troupe into her ’60s musical review Across the Universe).
“The most important influence of Bread and Puppet is to say it’s okay to do political art, it’s okay to do political theater, which to my mind is an extremely radical thing to say,” says John Bell of Cambridge, who has performed with Bread and Puppet since the ’70s and whose book, American Puppet Modernism, was just published. “Because I always feel, in American culture, that’s one of the primary ideological principals — that art and politics are okay by themselves, but you don’t mix them.”
A recurring theme in this summer’s shows is washing away a gory, warrior past and starting afresh. Three cooks in the pageant repeatedly scrub clean their bloody aprons. Lubberland speaks of explosions, burning homes, and corpses; then a dozen performers dance inside a giant white shirt as the narrator speaks: “A fresh shirt for humanity. A brand new shirt for a brand new job. A job which is totally clear even though it has no job description yet.”
There is little talk of November’s presidential election among the troupe, except occasional mocking of Obama as a man of shallow rhetoric. Many of the performers have an opt-out anarchist mindset and likely won’t vote. (Schumann, a resident German alien with a green card, is ineligible to cast a ballot.) They say that a Democrat would be little different from a Republican in the White House, that our political and economic system is so corrupted that it’s not worth participating in, that you must create your own fresh way of living. The theater models that — it is about sustainable, communal living, about redemption and acceptance — while also being a strict hierarchy devoted to producing Schumann’s vision. Others working with the troupe expect many there will vote for Obama as the better of two bad options.
