Bread and Puppet Theatre Presents RETURN OF ULYSSES, 1/24-30

Bread and Puppet Theater presents "The Return of Ulysses" and "Decapitalization Circus" : two separate performances presented in partnership with the Boston Center for the Arts as part of the Cyclorama Residency Series.  Performances, Art Exhibit, and Cheap Art Sale run from January 24 through January 30.  All held in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA), 539 Tremont St., South End, Boston.  Wheelchair accessible.  Tickets for the performances available for purchase [cash or check only] in the Cyclorama one hour before each performance.  For advance tickets, log onto www.breadandpuppet.org or call 866-811-4111 (toll free).  For detailed information regarding the week's events, call the BCA's Bread and Puppet Theater information line at 617-800-9539 or log onto www.bcaonline.org.

The award-winning Bread and Puppet Theater, featuring Artistic Director Peter Schumann and his troupe of Vermont puppeteers, returns for a fifth year to the BCA's Cyclorama bringing their signature powerful imagery, masked characters, and giant papier-mâché puppets.  This year, their residency includes two different puppet performances, "The Return of Ulysses" (January 27-30, evening performances primarily for ages 12 & older), "Decapitalization Circus" (January 29-30, family-friendly matinees), along with NOLANGUAGE, a week-long political art installation (running January 24-30, with an art opening on January 24).

Although all Bread and Puppet events have a seriousness of purpose - a few laughs are always thrown in!

Detailed listings information:

Evening Performances [recommended for ages 12 & older]:
Bread and Puppet Theater: The Return of Ulysses
Jan. 27-Jan. 30, Thurs.-Sun., 7 pm
$12 general admission [$10 students, seniors, & groups of 10 or more]
Description:  This "respectfully truncated," rough-hewn, and bold DIY adaptation of Claudio Monteverdi's opera was first developed this past June by Bread and Puppet in collaboration with the Theatre Department of Concordia University in Montreal and the Montreal Baroque Festival.  The production was initially performed as a dress rehearsal in the DB Clarke Theatre at Concordia and then presented as a festival performance in the plaza of the Centre Mondial.  During July & August in Glover, VT (Bread and Puppet's base of operations), the opera was pared down to approximately 75 minutes, including 10 minutes of prologue.  The performances have been conceived to include 20 volunteer puppeteers and 15-20 volunteer singers and instrumentalists in the chorus and orchestra with Peter Schumann playing the role of Penelope.  Schumann describes the plot as follows: "In order to commit genocide on their competitors, the Trojans, the tricky Greeks employ their multitalented sky, full of custom tailored divinities, to justify the crime, just as we employ our Judeo-Christian sky, occupied by a divine air force and permitted by the in-god-we-trust court system, to justify our atrocities in Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere.  By order of Jove, the boss, and with special help from his daughter Minerva, Ulysses finally returns home, where he has to murder 100 evil suitors in order to be happily reunited with wife and property."  The piece includes two prologues, "Modern Sky" and "Antique Sky."  For Boston, The Return of Ulysses will be performed by Peter Schumann and the Bread & Puppet Company, along with a large number of local volunteer puppeteers and musicians.  Informal talk back with the artists follows each performance.  Sourdough rye bread will be served and cheap art will be for sale after each performance.

Family-Friendly Matinees:
Bread and Puppet Theater: Decapitalization Circus
Jan. 29-Jan. 30, Sat.-Sun., 4 pm
$10 general admission [$5 students, seniors, and pre-school children (2 & under free)]
Description:  The family-friendly "Decapitalization Circus" demonstrates in numerous death-defying stunts the fantastic effects of the capitalization of life in the U.S. and citizens' courageous efforts of decapitalization.  The performers represent the whole scale of the social spectrum from benign billionairism to despicable homeless anti-social-elementarianism.  All the acts are FDA and FBI certified displays of patriotic correctness and defy all imaginable forms of terrorism.  The Possibilitarians, a multi-instrumental variety ensemble, provide the appropriate-inappropriate sounds for the Circus.  Performed by Peter Schumann and the Bread & Puppet Company, along with a large number of local volunteer puppeteers and musicians.  Take note that some of the circus acts are politically puzzling to adults, but accompanying kids can usually explain them.  The audience is welcome to examine all the masks and puppets after the performance.  Cheap art will be for sale after each performance.

Visual Art Exhibit:
Bread and Puppet Theater: NOLANGUAGE, visual art installation created by Peter Schumann
Jan. 24-Jan. 30, Mon.-Sun.
Free and open to all.
Description:  Bread and Puppet Theater Artistic Director Peter Schumann's most recent visual art exploration, ranging from very large paintings to very small string booklets, which depict matters that concern us all.
Exhibit details:
--Mon., Jan. 24, 6-9 pm: opening reception, with refreshments, an art talk given by Schumann, short skits performed by the touring company, and live music performed by the Boston Typewriter Orchestra (www.bostontypewriterorchestra.com) and the Dirty Water Brass Band (www.dirtywaterbrassband.com).
--Tues.-Fri., Jan. 25-28: regular Cyclorama hours: 9am-5pm [Thursday & Friday hours extended up to and after the evening performance].
--Sat.-Sun., Jan. 29-30: one hour before and after each matinee and evening performance.

For this residency at the Cyclorama, the Bread and Puppet touring company includes Schumann, along with Maura Gahan, Greg Corbino, MaryAnn Colella, Susie Perkins, among others.  Both the evening and matinee performances will be performed by the company and a large number of local volunteers and musicians, including the popular Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band (www.slsaps.org), who is the host band for the yearly HONK! Festival (www.honkfest.org) held in Davis Square.

In addition to Peter Schumann's NOLANGUAGE art installation, the Cyclorama will also be decorated with the unique Bread and Puppet collection of powerful black-line posters, banners, masks, curtains, programs and set-props.  All pieces are created by Schumann, including sculpting and painting all the major masks and puppets, with input from the company.  After each evening performance there will be an opportunity to savor Schumann's famous sourdough rye bread, smeared with garlic aioli; and there will also be many opportunities during the week to purchase the theater's legendary "cheap art."

Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally recognized company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art that is filled with music, dance and slapstick.  Its performances are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper maché and cardboard, a brass band for accompaniment, and anti-elitist dance.  Most are morality plays - about how people act toward each other - whose prototype is "Everyman".  There are puppets of all kinds and sizes, masks, sculptural costumes, paintings, buildings and landscapes that seemingly breathe with Schumann's distinctive visual style of dance, expressionism, dark humor and low-culture simplicity.

A SHORT HISTORY OF BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER

The Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in this country.  It was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City's Lower East Side.  Besides rod-puppet and hand-puppet performances for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police and other problems of that neighborhood.  More complex theater pieces, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners, followed.  The puppets grew bigger and bigger.  Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants.  Many performances were done in the street.

During the Vietnam War, Bread and Puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people.  In 1970 Bread & Puppet 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 itself 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.  "Our Domestic Resurrection Circus," a two-day outdoor festival of puppetry performances, was presented annually through 1998.

Through invitations by Grace Paley, Bread and Puppet Theater became a frequent attraction at anti-Vietnam War events in the '60s and '70s.  By the '80s, the puppets had become emblematic of activist pacifism and a sine qua non of American political theater, as exemplified by the massive, ascending figures that are burned into the memory of anyone who marched with or saw the haunting, massive June 12, 1982 Disarmament Parade in New York City.

Since its move to Glover, VT, Theater for the New City has been the company's New York home.  It has performed one or more productions at TNC each year since 1981.  The company also appeared at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in 2007.  In Boston, Bread and Puppet Theater has had a consistent presence since early on, most recently as an annual partner in the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama Residency Series.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad and from sales of Bread & Puppet Press's posters and publications.  Internationally, Bread and Puppet Theater performs massive spectacles with hundreds of participants, sometimes devoted to social, political and environmental issues and sometimes simply to the trials of everyday life.  The traveling puppet performances range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers.  At most performances, the company distributes bread and aioli (garlic sauce) to the audience.

Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Silesia.  He is married to Elka Leigh Scott and they live in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.  They have five children and five grandchildren.

You cannot understand Bread and Puppet's work without acknowledging that it is grounded in dance, but not in formal or classical dance.  Schumann's artistic pedigree is a mixture of dance and visual art.  There's dance at the bottom of all of Schumann's work, but since puppet theater is traditionally a "melting pot" of all the different arts, this is frequently obscure.

Schumann studied and practiced sculpture and dance in Germany and in 1959, with a childhood friend, musician Dieter Starosky, Schumann, created the Gruppe für Neuen Tanz (New Dance Group), which invented dances which sought to break out of the strict limits of both classical ballet and the expressionist dance tradition.

He moved to the USA with his wife, Elka, and at that time, their two children in 1961.  His formative years in the Lower East Side during the early '60s were heavily influenced by the radical innovations spearheaded by John Cage and Merce Cunningham.  Schumann rejected the elitism of the '60s arts scene and embraced the anti-establishment, egalitarian work of American artist Richard (Dicky) Tyler.  He embraced Outsider Art: everyday movement, improvisation, direct momentary composition, and the jazz impulse toward overall creativity.  He became a regular at Judson Poet's Theater and Phyllis Yampolsky's Hall of Issues, where puppet performances included making music and marching around.  Street Theater Productions followed, at rent strikes and voter registration rallies in the East Village, with crankies on garbage cans and speeches by a Puerto Rican neighborhood organizer, Bert Aponte.

He admired the abstraction of Merce Cunningham, and attended lectures at the Cunningham studio, but ultimately rebelled against it.  In an interview with John Bell in 1994, he said, "Cunningham demanded of his dancers was a classical ballet background.  He refused to work with anybody who didn't have that.  I totally disagreed.  I had traveled around in Europe teaching dance; to Sweden, to a dance academy and various places, pretending I was a great ass in dance, and gave them classes.  And they took me -- I was fresh and I just did it.  I said, 'I'll performance you what dance really is; what you do is just schlock,' and I tried to liberate them from aesthetics connected to modern dance and classical ballet and to these various modes of existing dance at the time.'"

The most recent creative history of Bread and Puppet Theater was written by Holland Cotter in the New York Times in 2007.  Cotter described Peter Schumann's epics as "spectacle for the heart and soul."  He commended Schumann for the courage "to live an ideal of art as collective enterprise, a free or low-cost alternative voice outside the profit system."  He testified that one summer, on a mountainside in Glover, VT, Bread and Puppet gave him the single most beautiful sight he's ever seen in a theater.  And when Bread and Puppet led the nuclear freeze parade in New York City during United Nations sessions on disarmament, it was "one of the most spectacular pieces of Public Theater the city has ever seen."  He added, "For me the real affirmation of the disarmament pageant lay less in the fact that Mr. Schumann came to New York and created this hugely ambitious collective work of art, than in the fact that immediately afterward he returned to Vermont, to a farm, to a barn, to the outdoor baking oven, to his workshops and to his own work, which has come to include an increasing amount of painting, most of which stays out of the art world's sight."

For more information on the Bread and Puppet Theater, log onto www.breadandpuppet.org.

 

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