Pontine to Welcome Bread & Puppet Theatre's 'THE SITUATION', 6/2

Tuesday 2 June at 7pm, Pontine presents the world-famous Bread & Puppet Theater in a new work, Public Access Center for the Obvious Presents: The Situation, written and directed by Peter Schumann.

This puppet play features an anti-extinction angel, the union of brooms, a 100 watt lightbulb, and a ship of fools: all for the purpose of urging the not yet upriser-masses into existence.

Admission is by donation ($15 is suggested) and doors will open at 6:45pm. Pontine's West End Studio Theatre is located at 959 Islington Street, Portsmouth NH. For more information, email info@pontine.org or call 603-436-6660.

A Brief History of Bread and Puppet Theater - In the early 1960's, a group of artists, headed by Peter Schumann, a sculptor, dancer and baker recently emigrated from Germany, rented a small loft in New York's Lower East side, and began putting on weekly performances. Schumann had just finished teaching a puppetry workshop at the Putney School in Vermont. Schumann took the resulting puppet show on the road. He converted a small trailer into a mobile puppet stage, and started a solo tour across New England, putting on impromptu performances in towns along the way. Back in New York City, Schumann quickly converted his loft space into a theater and puppet museum. Schumann's skills and interest in dance and sculpture were fused in puppetry. Peter and his wife, Elka, decided on the name Bread and Puppet Theater. The year was 1963.

The Bread and Puppet Theater would leave an indelible stamp on the world of theater. Enmeshed in the radical counterculture of downtown New York, Bread & Puppet became a familiar presence in the protest movement against the Vietnam War over the following decade. During the summers of '65 and '66, Bread & Puppet created large scale outdoor pageants in some of the poorest neighborhoods of New York City, and in collaboration with the residents addressed urban political and social issues of the day.

In 1968, Bread and Puppet presented Fire, a piece about the Vietnam war, to critical acclaim at the Nancy Theater festival in France. This launched the theater into international prominence and helped secure over a decade of seasonal touring in Europe and beyond. Bread & Puppet was associated with the New American Theater - an avant-garde movement that included companies as diverse as the Living Theater, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Robert Wilson and others. But, unlike many of his contemporaries, Schumann's sensibility was combined with much older forms and traditions: medieval passion plays, the bible, fairy tales and other folkloric traditions of storytelling. Bread and Puppet was also set apart by its economic independence. Guided by a philosophy of living and working within the means available, the Bread and Puppet aesthetic was inextricable from the papermache, burlap, twine, and staples, that made up and literally held the puppets and the shows together.

In 1970 Bread and Puppet moved to Vermont, first to a residency at Goddard College, then in 1975 to an old dairy farm in Glover VT. The annual Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was created, using the pastoral landscape to stage large scale outdoor productions. This festival grew to become Bread and Puppet's central activity, produced by over one hundred volunteers and drawing audiences in the tens of thousands. Seasonal touring became even more diversified, and included more local, regional and third world venues; Bread and Puppet workshops - where shows and circuses were put together using local volunteers - became a more common mode of production and performance; and the Bread and Puppet Press grew to become a staple of the theater's income. Schumann decided to end Circus in 1998, after the tragic death of an audience member in one of the campgrounds adjacent to the Theater. The Circus was succeeded by a summer program with weekly, smaller scaled performances. In this new format, the Theater continues its prolific output of new shows, addressing the issues of the day, as well as re-staging its classic shows from the 1960's and 1970's.

To post a comment, you must register and login.