Bread and Puppet: Domestic Resurrection Circus

REA D AND PU PPET DOt\ESTIC ReSURRECTION .. I DULY 31 1976 C RI U) S AUGUSTI STARTiNe AT 2. PM woiTH TH E SICENTIENNIAL c~IRCUS FLOItENC.E FAL, Once upon and into time there stands an old farmhouse near the town of Glover, a part of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. To its left is an enormous barn; behind it, a meadow tamed by a garden and a cow. Across the road, behind the hull of another, smaller barn, fields and meadows stretch their greenness to the edge of woodlands and to the rim of a pine forest. Beyond, spreading out in concentric circles, are the green mountains . The pine forest is especially compelling with its wind-whispers, its 19 shadows, its green-brown scents, its rich decay into life. Overall, the sky, a tempest of moods, behaves like one of the petulant gods of mythology. Hour to hour the weather shifts from sun to rain, from warmth to cold; its characteristic is constant metamorphosis. Since 1975, this landscape, comprising more than two hundred acres, has been the site of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre, the home of the Schumann family and temporary meeting ground of puppeteers, and the natural "setting" for Schumann's evolving art form, the "Domestic Resurrection Circus." The "raw idea" of the Circus took shape at Goddard College in Plainsfield, Vermont, where the Bread and Puppet Theatre company was in residence from 1970 to 1974. The following year the company disbanded and the Schumann family moved to the Glover farmhouse: When we moved here [Glover, Vermont] the raw idea became the beginning of something new. We wanted to incorporate into a new community, to use the landscape that was here, to find out which piece of landscape was best, to find out how to work without a resident company, to invite people into the Circus, to respond to people who want to be taken into it, and to involve the community in it.1 The present Circus consolidates six years of work. As form follows function , it is an out-of-doors puppet and mask piece - an updated form of the medieval theatre-in-the-round that incorporates within its cyclic structure pageants, processions, static tableaux and tableaux vivants, impromptu and set pieces, sculpture, dance, music, songs, feasts, rest periods and, of course, the "Circus." In the 1976 Circus this inner "Circus" (a salutation in parodic form to the carnival and side-show world and to the worlds of Alice, Gulliver, hobbits, and the rest) took place in a four-acre bowl-shaped natural arena whose graduated slopes provided comfortable seating for spectators. The rest of the program ran as follows: From three until six, thirty separate shows ran concurrently on fixed "stages" set along the "Midway" (a 40'x 500' meadow strip rimmed by the woods on one side and by the natural arena on the other), in the pine forest, and in the neighboring meadows. Despite the fact that the shows were brief (15 to 20 minutes) and repeated at intervals throughout the afternoon, only the most fanatical spectators could see them all in one day. But the natural setting encouraged. leisurely participation and most spectators were content to catch shows as they strolled along the Midway, in the pine forest, or across the meadow to Schumann's "free Sourdough Rye Bread Store." The evening program began at six "deep in the pine forest." Spectators sat on wooden benches and hay bales for a performance of Bach's choral work, Jesu, Meine Freude, which was accompanied by a mask and mime enactment of the text. At eight, the audience returned to the southern slope of the "Circus" arena to watch the "Domestic Resurrection Pageant." Timed to the rhythm of the sunset, the Pageant featured "wildmen, banners, sun, song, deer, horses, ark, cannon, moon, stars, giant white birds, drums, stilt-red birds, drums, torches, lanterns, and nightfall." Afterwards, a truly insatiable spectator could still watch a short play, Young Woman Sorrow, or listen to. fifteenth-century motets in the "barn-museum" (which houses and displays all puppets and masks). "We will build a circus," said Schumann when the Circus first began...