Code Pink pales by comparison to Peter Schumann and Bread &Puppet

[cali]

or person I can think of. Aside from that, their artisty is unbelivable. It's no wonder, Schumann is considered to be one of the foremonst artists (not just theatre artists) of the 20th centure.

I'm not knocking any other activists; I'm just trying to give Schumann and B&P accolades for all they've done.

Just out of curiosity, any DUers ever go to the Pageant and Circus?

From wiki:The Bread and Puppet Theater (often known simply as Bread & Puppet) is a politically radical puppet theater, active since the 1960s, currently based in Glover, Vermont. Its founder and director is Peter Schumann.

The name Bread & Puppet derives from the theater's practice of sharing its own fresh bread, served for free with a strong garlic aioli, with the audience of each performance as a means of creating community, and from its central principle that art should be as basic to life as bread. Some have heard echoes of the Roman phrase "bread and circuses" or the labor slogan "Bread and Roses" in the theater's name as well, though these are not often mentioned in Bread & Puppet's own explanations of its name.

The Bread and Puppet Theater participates in parades including Fourth of July celebrations, with many effigies including a satirical Uncle Sam on stilts.<1>


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

From the NYT August Sunday Arts Section:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/theater/05cott.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Spectacle for the Heart and Soul


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I have another association with the troupe: Bread and Puppet gave me the single most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in a theater. That was in 1982, in the sloping, wide-open field that is part of the theater’s farm in Glover, Vt. There the collective was presenting a two-day festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, as it had done almost every summer since relocating from the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.

The circus, a bunch of political skits, concerts and vaudeville acts, took place in the afternoon, and it was fun. (The troupe’s Lincoln Center appearance will follow more or less this format, on a smaller scale.) Then at sunset came the pageant, a kind of morality play told in epic visual terms. During Vietnam the themes had been specific. Wrongs had a name and a solution: Stop the war. By the 1980s the issues had become many and complicated — threatened nature, global consumerism, nuclear dangers — and remedies far less sure. The 1982 pageant had an odd tone, brusque and apocalyptic. It opened with a bucolic scene: little cutout houses and trees carried onto the field, followed by puppets of dancing cows. Villagers in masks arrived, milked the cows, settled down to bed, woke up, had children who within minutes had children of their own. This was ordinary life set to haunting music: vigorous, low-church American folk hymns from the 19th-century collection “The Sacred Harp.”

Suddenly four dark puppet horses with devil riders wheeled in from afar, backed by a huge dragon. Almost without warning the devils waved black banners over the villagers, who fell to the ground, dead. The devils then piled the houses and horses together and set them alight. Good and evil alike were in flames. Moral chaos. End of story.

But not quite. As the fire burned, a half-dozen great white gulls or cranes — muslin kites carried on sticks by runners — soared up from the horizon and started flying in our direction. They came right to the flames and soared over them as if looking for signs of life. Then they circled back across the field, melting into darkness. It was fantastic. Only when they were out of sight did I see that night had fallen and stars were out. It felt like an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle. I had been simultaneously transported and pulled back to earth.

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edited to change thread title to something more provocative, so people might actually look at the thread.

[cali]

1. kick