The End of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus

The End of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus Bread and Puppet Theater and Counterculture Performance in the s John Bell The Bread and Puppet Theater’s Domestic Resurrection Circus emerged in the context of the countercultural goals of the s and ’s. How did the development of counterculture-as-commodity in the s and ’s affect the end of this unique -year performance event? My intent is not to focus so much on the theatre of the Circus, but on the events surrounding it, and the nature of its presence in the spectacle economy of Vermont and the United States. : Counterculture Puppet Theatre in Plainfield Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater started in New York in the s, when the city was seeing the creation of a new avantgarde in the midst of the Cold War and its then hot ancillary in Vietnam. In the fertile atmosphere of places like Judson Church, artistic borders were crossed or broken: musicians acted, painters sang, sculptors (like Schumann) danced, and poets wrote plays. Rent was relatively cheap, and there were men and women interested in making art, music, and theatre in ways that would connect new and old forms, in order to respond to and reflect what seemed to be going on around them. Bread and Puppet Theater grew in this atmosphere. Perhaps it did not flourish in the sense of becoming commercially famous (as Jim Henson’s Muppets soon did), but it changed the way puppets were thought of in the United States. Schumann’s moving sculptures created a visual focus, first in parades organized by Puerto Rican tenants’ organizations on the Lower East Side, and then even more strikingly in parades in New York and Washington, DC, protesting the Vietnam War. Yet the greatest renown the theatre had achieved was not in New York at all but in Paris and other European cities, where Bread and Puppet’s intense, often mute images were recognized both as part of the th- century avantgarde tradition and as an example of the development of s American avantgarde performance. The Drama Review , (T), Fall . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760347333 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bread & Puppet In the late ’s Peter and his wife and partner Elka received an offer to be a theatre-in-residence at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Goddard was (and still is) an experimental school with a long tradition in progressive education. Schumann was happy to leave New York—the prospect of raising five children on an old farm in the countryside was very alluring. So Bread and Puppet took up residence on Cate Farm, a large parcel of land with a big barn, outbuildings, fields, and a brick farmhouse set in a bend of the Onion River. Goddard College, owner of the farm, was undergoing an enormous boom as its interpretation of John Dewey’s teaching philosophies attracted hundreds of students interested in alternative education. Goddard became a center of s counterculture, a community of artisans, musicians, ac- tivists, performers, entrepreneurs, and communes who fed each other the vision of an alternative way of life at some distance from the economics and mass culture of American capitalism. Plainfield boasted an active food co-op, the Plainfield Village Chorus spe- cializing in Bach Cantatas and th-century masses, a Plainfield Village Gamelan, and The Word of Mouth Chorus. This chorus sang Balkan music, Early Music, and above all Sacred Harp music—the early American shape-note singing tradition which implied democracy in its community, nonchurch ori- gins, and independence in the way it forsook traditional European harmonies for more raw “American” progressions and chord structures. In addition to traditional courses, the Goddard curriculum included courses on how to build houses, “social ecology,” a radical history of Vermont taught by Kirpatrick Sale, nontraditional non-Western music taught by Dennis Murphy, and a theatre department, headed by Paul Vela, that incubated the early plays of Goddard student David Mamet and created off-campus groups like Two Penny Circus, and collaborations with Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. But in a way, the most important aspect of Bread and Puppet’s move to Vermont was how it dovetailed with the experience of Elka Schumann’s grandfather, the radical economist Scott Nearing, years earlier. In , Nearing and his wife Helen had left New York City for southern Vermont, to live the “Good Life” by creatively combining subsistence farming with political and intellectual activity. The Nearings held steadfast to their socialist ideals throughout the following decades, and by the late s were seen as examples of how to lead an alternative political and social life. The Nearings had wanted to inspire city-bound factory workers of the Depression era, but the young people going “back to the land” in the ’s and ’s were mostly middle-class, and sooner or later developed hybrid ways of living that recon- nected them to mainstream American society. It was possible, especially in the bustling counterculture of Plainfield, to imag- ine alternatives; to consider the experience of the Nearings in southern Vermont as an example on which to build. I believe this in large part inspired the Schumanns’ focus on what became Our Domestic Resurrection Circus. Above all, the Nearings’ experiences farming, maple sugaring, teaching, writing, and distrib- uting their books showed that it was possible to achieve radical goals in th- century America by doing it yourself and taking slow satisfaction in the accomplishment of limited success. Scott Nearing, after all, was famous for build- ing a pond by excavating a few wheelbarrows of earth every day for decades. In New York City, Bread and Puppet performance spaces were most often tiny storefronts and lofts, occasionally theatres, and very often streets and city parks. But Vermont opened up new possibilities. The Schumanns and their collaborators began making shows at the edge of the largest field in Cate Farm. They marked out a circular performance area with -foot tall flag- poles, set up a large old brown tent at its edge, and, using masks and larger- than-life-size puppets, created abstract political puppet skits played in the Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760347333 by guest on 27 September 2021 John Bell . Vietnamese Lady puppets in the Pageant se- round to the music of a “junk orchestra,” amateur brass band, and Sacred quence of the Harp singing. Schumann wrote of the first Circus: Domestic Resurrection Circus at Cate Farm. Our Domestic Resurrection Circus will be an effort to find a new way of do- (Photo by Ruth ing circus that is more human, that is not merely a collection of superla- Barenbaum; courtesy of tives, of extraordinary feats arbitrarily mixed together, but something that Bread & Puppet Theater) becomes a story of the world circus. [...] It has to do with just creating a big outside attraction for the people in the area. It’s a piece that shouldn’t be traveled, something we want to perform where we can integrate the landscape, that we can do with real time and real rivers and mountains and animals. It’s something that is seen in the woods, up there in the hills, back here in the river. I guess it would be called an “environment!” (in Kourilsky :–) These events were the original Domestic Resurrection Circuses, and they art- fully employed the energies of the Plainfield performing community. When Françoise Kourilsky wrote about the Circus in , she noted its connections to Happenings, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, bauhaus, dada, and Kurt Schwitters. But, of course, to call an event a “circus” is to embrace a central form of popular culture, and Our Domestic Resurrection Circus did exactly this, not only seeking connections to American and European circus traditions, but to American historical pageants, carnivals, and county fairs (Kourilsky ). “The first version of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus,” Kourilsky wrote, “was like a history of America, ending with the war in Vietnam” (:). Like most Bread and Puppet Theater productions, it was both more and less than a history: more in that it constantly sought to make bigger sense of events by using the automatically evocative abstract symbolism of puppets and masks; and less, in that it always had room for silly jokes, pratfalls, and sheer nonsense. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760347333 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bread & Puppet This openness marked the development of the Circus throughout its long life, and influenced the form it took until its end in : a presentation of simulta- neous Sideshows, followed by a Puppet Circus performed in a ring, followed by a traveling Passion Play, a Pageant during sunset, and then evening shows lasting until : or : P.M. Schumann distributed his sourdough rye bread in a “Free Bread Store,” and no admission was ever charged, although donations were vigorously solicited. Moving to Glover The Bread and Puppet residency at Goddard College ended in . The theatre moved north to an ex–dairy farm in Glover, about miles south of the Canadian border in a somewhat remote region called the Northeast King- dom. When I drove up to Glover the first summer I worked with Bread and Puppet, I sat in the back of a Chevrolet panel truck driven by Schumann, and looking through the windshield I quite clearly felt the differ- ence from the busy community in Plainfield. The further north we headed, the sparser the houses and farms became, the longer the unbroken stretches of pine-covered hills and forest.

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