Opportunity to see Bread & Puppet Theater if you live in the Northbay!

This is a great opportunity to see and make puppets with one of America's most preeminent activist puppet theater groups.

Press Release:

BREAD & PUPPET THEATER ANNOUNCES WEST COAST TOUR

Founder, Peter Schumann and his Radical Theater Troupe come West Sept 29-Oct. 25, 2015

August 26, 2015--(San Francisco, CA)    For the first time in fourteen years, artist Peter Schumann and his Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater will tour the West Coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle, with a series of performances, workshops, lectures, an exhibit of the Bread and Puppet Press, plus a parade--all  in the Bay Area from October 7 to 12, 2015.  Bread and Puppet will be performing it’s original play, FIRE, which catapaulted the company to international acclaim 50 years ago.  Fans and friends of the troupe’s ethos of accessible, radical  artmaking can partake in a feast of events this October:

·         50 years of Bread & Puppet Press exhibit at the SF Center for the Book--Oct 7 Opening and reception with founders, Peter and Elka Schulmann; show closes XXXX

·         “FIRE” & Cantastoria Performance, followed by a Bread Reception at The Grange, Sebastapol, Wed., Oct 7, 7 p.m.

·         “FIRE” & Fiddle Talk by Peter Schumann, with a Bread Reception at the Internet Achive--Friday, Oct 9, 6-10 p.m.

·         Dedication of the Bread & Puppet Archive--150 hours of circus, pageants, passion plays, 250 puppeteers all available for streaming at www.archive.org/details/breadandpuppet; with filmmaker, Dee Dee Halleck, Friday, Oct 9 at the Internet Archive 7 pm.

·         Art-making workshops, Cantastoria, bread baking at the Luggage Store Annex & Tenderloin National Forest, 509 (?) Ellis Street, SF

·         “We are All in the Same Boat” Parade--Dolores Park, Saturday, Oct 10, volunteers meet at 1 p.m.

“We believe in puppet theater as a wholesome and powerful language that can touch men, women and children alike,” says Bread and Puppet Founder, Peter Schumann, 81.  “We hope that our plays are true and are saying what has to be said.”  In 1963, Schumann started performing on New York’s Lower East Side with simple rod and hand puppet shows for children.  The concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police and the other pressing problems of the neighborhood.  A dancer, sculptor and baker, Schumann later starting baking and serving bread to his audiences, noting in his Cheap Art Manifesto that “Art is food.  You can’t eat it, but it feeds you.”  His philosophy synthesizes artmaking with politics and daily life.  Peter and his wife, Elka, called it Bread and Puppet Theater.  The name stuck.

Bread and Puppet would embark on a remarkable 50-year journey, leaving an indelible stamp on the world of theater and the American cultural landscape.  Enmeshed in the radical counterculture and earliest demonstrations again the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, Bread and Puppet became a familiar presence in the protest movement. Meanwhile, the puppets grew bigger and bigger--some up to 18 feet high--in processions that spanned blocks and hundreds of people.  

In 1965, Schumann and his troupe presented “FIRE” for the first time, a hard-hitting piece about the Vietnam War, to critical acclaim at the Nancy Theater Festival in France.  This launched the company into global prominence, with tours throughout Europe and beyond. Bread and Puppet became a seminal part of the avant-garde movement that included companies such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Living Theater and Robert Wilson.

Since 1970, Bread and Puppet has spun its magic from a farm in Glover, Vermont, with hundreds of apprentices gudied by a philosophy of living and working within available means, making “cheap art” that is easily accessible to the people.  This frugal ethos permeates Bread and Puppet’s aesthetic, inextricable from the paper-mache, burlap, twine and cardboard that litterally hold the puppets and shows together.

At at time when an economic divide threatens to tear San Francisco into the haves and have nots, Bread and Puppet brings its art and ethos to everyone--from children to the elderly, artists to tech workers. The public is invited to participate in a huge culminating procession through San Francisco’s Dolores Park on October 10, at 1 p.m.  Schumann will lead the “We are All in the Same Boat” parade with hundreds of volunteers, musicians, stilt-walkers and citizens,  asking a provocative question for the Bay Area in 2015:  “What if we could all swim together?”

ABOUT FIRE:

         “Humans wage war against each other and their own mother: Nature.  Essentially  war is the ferocious stupidity that insists on the application of brutality for problem solution, whether the brutality is directed at humans or mountaintops.  “FIRE” is a chapel against war, where you sit down to witness the effects of war while contemplating its opposite.”

Click here for an interview with Peter Schumann.