Whether you come up Route 93 or Route 91 looking for Glover, Vermont, you won't see any signs for the festival. Neither will you see any in St. Johnsbury or Lyndonville, and even Route 122 north into Glover has nothing tacked on to telephone poles or propped up on sandwich boards alongside the road. In fact, nothing but a few hand-lettered signs in big Magic-Markered san-serif type saying "Festival parking here $2" or "Camping: Free wood and water" indicate that you're anywhere near where you're supposed to be.
But you find it nevertheless, you and several thousand pilgrims who have arranged themselves on the sides of a natural amphitheater to watch Bread and Puppet Theatre's annual Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant, usually (but not always) held in August.
The fact that this festival even takes place in the post-modern Gingrichfied final years of the millennium seems a bit astonishing. Bread and Puppet's Domestic Resurrection celebration unabashedly practices the didactic thrust of 1960s guerilla theatre by using puppets of all shapes and sizes in highly politicized and allegorical pageantry to promote a vision of life at once whole, focused, humane, and peaceful. In not too many other places in the United States today can one find a yearly renewal of fun and frolic laced with political instruction in a utopian/commutarian vein which hands out free bread made from hand-milled rye, baked in a large wood-fired oven, and slathered with a dynamite garlic chutney. Art, bread, and garlic -- some would say a much more useful trinity than the Three Tenors, or the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Bread and Puppet Theatre was founded by Peter Schumann in the late 1960s, capping a life-long effort to find a medium that would encompass his interests in dance, puppets, sculpture, painting, and allegorical theatre. In 1962, when he taught with his wife Elka at the Putney School in Putney, Vermont, he wrote a manifesto that outlined the purposes of his art. According to the author Stefan Brecht, the manifesto stated that
art should be produced not as art, but as response to life; not as expression of individuality, but of what is shared with others; and not as luxury, but out of felt need; and not so that the products (art works) might be there, but for the sake of doing it.1
Much of this urge to create an art larger than life in order to celebrate life came from his own history growing up during World War II. Born in 1934 in Lueben, Silesia, not far from Breslau, his family had to retreat from the Russians in 1944 to Hanover, where they were able to set up a thriving, if never prosperous, life for themselves. Several memories of this time resonate throughout many Bread and Puppet productions. He recalls his mother baking long-lasting sourdough loaves of bread from rye grain to feed the family, a tradition he continues at each year's Domestic Resurrection pageant and which he used to form the name of the troupe itself. And destruction visited by bombers upon helpless people often appears in as a motif in his work.
As he went through school, he made masks for an arts class project and did some stone carving on his own, and in his last year at the Gymnasium, he staged a mime/dance performance based on The Magic Lantern by Heinrich von Heisler.2 He also formed a friendship with Max Jacobs, a puppeteer who ran the Hohnsteiner Puppenspiele, and as he said, "I was a dedicated puppeteer when I was a kid. I did a lot of puppet shows."3
So the elements were there from very early on in life: the media of puppetry, dance, mime, sculpture; the experience of war's hardships, especially for ordinary people; and a kind of understated but still emphatic Christianity, not fervent but quietly religious, not interested so much in the forms and rites as in the allegory of suffering and redemption. These elements played themselves out in different ways as Schumann worked his way through various artistic efforts in Europe and the United States, where sometimes the performance aspect mattered most to him, the "how" of a piece, only to shift to a focus on the ethical message, the "why." These oscillating impulses picked up energy from the political and artistic maelstroms caused by an alienated 1950s crashing into a 1960s determined to destroy such anomie through engagement and moral confrontation. Like many artists, Schumann made his way to New York, where his productions (now known as the Bread and Puppet Theatre) supported the peace movement; a parade or a demonstration was never complete without a complement of Schumann larger-than-life puppets marching down the center of the street.
But as the always-fragile alliance between the Old Left, with its focus on education, and the New Left, with its drift into power politics, dissolved, Schumann, who preferred the Old Left's focus on a considered approach to confronting power and suffering, found himself less and less willing to put up with the abrasions of living in New York. So, with Elka and his children, he moved to Vermont, he and his Theatre invited to be artists-in-residence at Goddard College. With the help of Goddard students and a large workspace on Cate Farm, Schumann could start something he had had in mind for a while: to recast the whole Bread and Puppet operation into the itinerant mold of the folk puppeteers who, during the Middle Ages, travelled from village to village, from fair to fair, playing for the people. This idea was the genesis for his first two Circuses in 1970 and 1971.
The first Domestic Resurrection Circus and Pageant took place on Dopp Farm in 1975; about 800 people attended each of the two days. When asked why he chose the name "Domestic Resurrection," he said
"domestic" because it is domestic. That is, the immediate concern of any artist, I assume, is to deal with the immediate -- with the domestic surroundings -- the as domestic as possible surroundings, and "resurrection" because one has to steal that term from the religious clubs, or from the religious traditions and can't allow it to belong to that category of mankind....There's no description of a realistic -- a biological resurrection attempted, right, we are not telling a fairy tale, we don't have that. But we are calling this -- what happens after all the elements that we used in the show die -- that what follows that death -- that picks all that up again -- we're calling that the resurrection...I guess the main thing about that term, "Domestic Resurrection," is that it was to be the title for an all inclusive cyclic show that wants to -- has the ambition to include everything. To make details of life be part of large communal or larger than individual events.4
While the outer "garb" of the "Domestic Resurrections" has changed over the twenty years Schumann has been staging them, their inner rhythm of presentation has hardly varied at all. They begin with the Circus, where scenes of folly and foolishness clear the emotional palate, so to speak, providing a kind of catharsis that opens the audience to the next stage of the festival, the evening Pageant.
At the Pageant, which by its nature is more ceremonial and instructional, the audience is taken down from the afternoon hilarity into what Brecht calls "the somber valley of tears of finite individual life."5 The downward slope of this emotional movement parallels Schumann's vision of life as suffering -- not unredeemable (in fact, the whole Pageant is based on resurrecting hope) but surely not unavoidable. During the Pageant, great wrongs happen in plain sight of the audience: goddesses dethroned, villages pillaged, people "cleansed" from the land, the natural world minced for profit. The politics here are anti-capitalist, anti-exploitation, but the criticism stays at a fairly high level: not punditry for the op-ed page but an allegorical derision of the hunger for the sterile abundance of profit. In short, not editorial but sermon.
In the end, what saves the world from its own worst impulses, what puts flesh on the "resurrection," is, for Schumann, the inevitable movement within Nature toward continuous re-creation, towards Nature's unending offer of second chances. Humans must give themselves over to this power, which is why at the end of the Pageant Mother Earth comes to collect everyone in her arms and enfold them in her power while the forces of profit literally go up in flames. Human beings, Schumann seems to say, must not consider themselves specially chosen or particularly significant; if they do, they'll become tempted to make the world over into their image and just muck things up. Instead, they should adjust their lives to the powerful natural forces around them that can mitigate their suffering, living in harmony rather than resistance, recognizing that in their diminishment they may find that significance in life that all their hubris has hidden from them.
* * * * *
But to describe Bread and Puppet so pedantically is like saying that the Sistine Chapel is just a painting about some stuff from the Bible: it doesn't give any of the feel. The Bread and Puppet headquarters in Glover occupy what is still known as the Dopp farm, 260 acres of fields and woods framed by blue-misted mountains. On one side of Route 122, which bisects their property, stands an enormous weathered barn, which houses their museum. Inside, as one walks through two decades worth of Bread and Puppet productions -- masks the size of satellite dishes, tall cylindrical angels, a dreary choir of the anguished masses -- one gets a taste, small but potent, of the issues and principles that have driven Bread and Puppet since their first Domestic Resurrection celebration in 1975: instituting social justice, negating the dire cannibalism of the capitalist economy, giving voice and shape to the ordinary people of the earth, promoting a love of the earth itself.
Across the highway sits the Cheap Art Store, a no-longer-mobile school bus painted with slogans and flowers in a motif right out of the sixties, where the visitor can find books of hand-written poetry, hand-drawn posters, utopian political tracts, dystopian political tracts, memoirs of forgotten backwoods radicals, calls to arms from across the intellectual and political spectrum, and, of course, copies of the "Why Cheap Art? Manifesto," which begins with the declaration that "ART IS NOT A BUSINESS!" and ends with "Art is like green trees! / Art is like white clouds in blue sky! / ART IS CHEAP! / HURRAH!"
Next to the Cheap Art Store, a narrow entrance between two copses of trees opens onto the other half of the Bread and Puppet property, undulant former hay fields ringed by prim vertical stands of white pine and denser conclaves of maple and oak. Broadcast among the dozens of "side-shows," displays, staging areas, and traveling presentations -- with names like "Passion Play for Bosnia," "The Last Seven Words of Christ," and "Mr. Budhoo's Letter of Resignation from the International Monetary Fund" -- are hundreds of people of every anthropometric design and social class: If it were a car dealership, the crowd would include everything from Saabs to VW buses jury-rigged with baling twine. Hair comes tinted senior-citizen blue or dyed in purples and greens, buzzed in brush cuts or roped in dreadlocks, corporate coiffed or grunge chopped. Clothes follow hair: Dockers, drooping over-sized shorts, Budweiser-logo T-shirts, tie-dyes, one-strap bib overalls, Gap, Goodwill rejects, Patagonia jackets. For a moment it's possible to believe that one has entered a Star Trek wormhole and zipped back a quarter-century to Berkeley or San Francisco.
Other rendezvous sites are tucked away in the woods. One of the most poignant and, at the same time, delightful settings honors Bread and Puppet members who have died. The memorials are all small houses made out of rough wood, each decorated with artifacts and flowers to reflect the character of the person bearing its name. The children really like this spot because they can move from house to house as if moving from ride to ride at a playground, and at one house, built on two levels with a ladder connecting bottom to top, they clamber up and down, playing first Juliet on the balcony and then Romeo on the ground. A trio of kids even play "Three Little Pigs," going from one house to the next reciting "I'll huff and I'll puff...." While the children amuse themselves, the adults move more pensively, reflecting on the characters of these unknown but reverenced people through the words lettered on signs tacked to walls, pictures left behind, artifacts arranged in rough but considerate attention.
The first of the main attractions of the day, the Circus, begins at three. From a road a good half-mile off that enters the amphitheater through a large stand of dense pines buzz in two multi-colored school buses. On top sit performers waving white flags, while the Bread and Puppet Orchestra blares out a rag-time march tune; the rest of the puppeteers cram the seats inside. The crowd erupts into a prolonged and rhythmic cheer as the buses screech to a halt and people and props tumble from the buses in a vaudevillian choreography of preparation.
For the next hour people watch a mix of political satire, clownish mummery, and obscure allegory peopled with everything from children on stilts wearing bathing suits to demons, angels, lions, tigers, buffalos, and flamingos. To give a bite of the flavor: In one piece, a young child walks into the center of the arena wearing a sign around his neck: "Chiapas." Behind him stalk a quartet of tigers, upon whose hides have been pinned signs: GATT, NAFTA, IMF, PRI. Slowly they surround the child and close in on him, finally pouncing; clothes fly up into the air and the child (neatly tucked under one of the tigers and then spirited to the sidelines) disappears down their gullets.
Looking smug (or as smug as one can under painted canvas and heavy masks), the lions congratulate themselves on their victory. But suddenly they're set up on by the Zapatistas, dressed in black with red headbands and brandishing lion-taming whips, and before long the rebels have the lions rolling over, balancing on a see-saw, and jumping through flaming hoops.
Other pieces: a Native American dancer does the hoop dance while the buffalo return to watch him; a flock of children dressed as hens implore a rooster to let them sleep; a plea to release Mumia Abu-Jamal; and the final grand march, with an Uncle Sam on twenty-foot stilts (Schumann himself) leading the company.
The evening pageant is just as vibrant and large-scale, always an allegory about the depredations visited upon the earth and its protective goddess by the scourge of industrial capitalism. As an example, in 1995 the pageant features a forty-foot tall "suit" (headless) which stalks across the land like one of H.G. Wells' Martians, setting up various industries (the "ego industry," the "freedom industry") that kill off all natural life in the process and prompt "ethnic cleansings" of various sorts. But just as the sky grows darkest, a flock of children holding large origami cranes on poles pours over the lip of a hill to encircle the destroyers, and out of the distance floats a renewed Mother Earth, thirty-feet tall with wide-spread arms, gathering to her all the peoples of the earth. Meanwhile the suit, impaled in the center of the arena, bursts into flames amid the jubilation of re-collected humanity. As the crowd pours down onto the field, shouting and dancing, the moon rises smoothly in the sky.
* * * * *
Bread and Puppet's performances are unabashedly about ordinary people gathering their powers to overthrow what is (to the Theatre) an insane American and Western European culture that destroys people and the earth for profit. Their brand of theatre is not "theatre" in the bourgeois sense of sitting behind an imaginary fourth wall while actors move on stage. They want their theatre to make people think and act and become involved in changing the facts of things. Towards this end, everything the Theatre does is large in order to make it as inclusive and visible as possible.
But what are we to make of an art like this in the waning years of the millennium? Schumann's art might be called "political fabulism," in that he uses the mechanics of fable (categorical "types" for characters; a linear through-line for the narrative, without much shading or ambiguity; easily recognized cultural symbols; a moral bundle to be untied at the end) to advance a political critique of Western culture in general and American actions in particular. His dichotomies -- that the goodness of the "folk" can overpower the calculation of the powerful, that the natural order will triumph over the artificial and industrialized -- clearly place him on the side of the oppressed and exploited, and to this degree we could add "populist" to the label of "political fabulism."
However, I have to wonder, after seeing a Bread and Puppet performance like the Circus and Pageant, what is the lasting effect of this kind of art? I know what the immediate effect is: whoops and cheers at the audacity of it all; a grand cascade of laughter at the comeuppance received by the "bad guys," especially since they so rarely get it in real life; a momentary feeling of camaraderie with thousands of like-minded souls. With the moon fluorescing the sky and the capitalist-fed flames flickering over a dancing assemblage, one feels lightened and leavened and (dare it be possible?) hopeful.
But what direction does it give for concerted, thoughtful effort once the viewer leaves Dopp Farm and sinks back into his or her daily life? Brecht said that "Schumann's hope for an effect on a popular audience may be in terms of this power of art to deliver images that stay and that possibly unbeknownst to oneself alter one's perception." In Schumann's case, the hoped-for effect would be "a shift toward revulsion in the feelings attending encounters with even those depredations on the environment by business by the viewers in question consciously accepted as norm."6 Therein lies both the strength and weakness of Schumann's art. It can go no deeper than presenting the political populist fable. It has no "program" by which people can take those feelings of "revulsion" and launch them into the historical struggle to change their society's history. Schumann can only hope that something he and his puppeteers did stamped itself boldly enough on one's spirit and mind so that it can act later as a template for proper action.
But then again, it may be too much to ask Schumann to provide a "how-to" to turn his broad parabolic strokes about justice and oppression into a historically charged engagement within a flexible analytical framework. Perhaps, as he believed, it is simply enough to establish an invigorating and thoughtful week-end once a year where people can come and support fighting the good fight, can practice refusing to give in to the homogenization of American culture, can dream of having the courage to ridicule and exhort. In this sense, at least, the candor, humor, and simple goodness of Bread and Puppet Theatre does indeed constitute a much needed domestic resurrection.
(February 1996)