Performing the Landscape: Bread and Puppet
Note: this essay, previously unpublished, was written in 1991. Before I became a filmmaker in 2000, I spent 20 years making performance works, so, to me, the connection between experimental performance and experimental film is perfectly clear. I’m including it here for those readers who are also interested in live performance.)
Peter Schumann’s theater uses masks and puppets, ranging in size from hand puppets to immense figures, covering entire hillsides. Born in German-speaking Silesia (now part of Poland) in 1934, he moved to New York City in 1962, and has since staged these precisely scored and choreographed events in churches and theaters as part of political demonstrations and at the Bread and Puppet company’s 127 acre communal farm in Northeastern Vermont. Their two day festival has been held every summer since 1975 and often draws more than 20,000 people a day. While political concerns, particularly a sympathy with the world’s poor and oppressed people and a fierce opposition to the horrors of war, are always the motivating force behind Schumann’s work, the shows are also brilliant spectacles which delight the eye, ear, and imagination, and they have a strong religious component as well. They appeal to both children and adults, the politically aware and the unaware, working class and professionals, city and country dwellers.
The summer festival, called Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, is an all day event which includes two major productions in the huge natural amphitheater at the farm’s center, a traveling show which moves around the farm, numerous sideshows which take place simultaneously in a pine forest and elsewhere, nighttime shows, performances by Bread and Puppet alumni such as performance artist Paul Zaloom, musicians, art exhibits, and political discussions. There are also spontaneous acts of juggling, drumming and other performances which the audience, quite a bit more informal and participatory that the usual summer theater crowd, creates whenever there is a lull. Hundreds of volunteers, many of them local, augment the group to make masks and puppets, hand out free bread, and perform in the shows. Sunday is a repeat of Saturday’s program.
The audience is a blend of native Vermonters and Canadians, ex-urban Vermonters, political activists, hippies and very young neo-hippies who make Bread and Puppet part of their summer circuit, and a few theater people from New York. The connection between Schumann, with his Old Left politics of the solidarity of the workers, and the pleasure-and-liberation politics of his New Left audiences, is tenuous at times, but it is achieved through the political activism which they both advocate, and by the visual and aural sensuality of the puppet shows themselves.
An especially innovative aspect of Schumann’s work in Vermont is the Pageant, which thoroughly integrates the landscape into performance. It is performed shortly before dusk, in a playing area which includes a large central field, several hilly fields beyond it which are backed by woods, the pine forest to the left, and a long road leading into more woods on the right. It consists of a series of visual transformations of the landscape, accompanied by silence, bells, horns, fiddles, pebbles, making mostly textural, non-melodic music.
In a performance space which takes ten minutes to cross walking normally, the show’s slower developmental rhythm seems natural. Schumann gradually draws the audience into the piece’s slow pace. A hundred or so performers process around a 20 foot tall Earth Mother Goddess puppet, singing a hymn to nature, while others slowly turn her in the opposite direction, settling the audience down considerably. The hymn is from the American Shape Note tradition, a style of music which Schumann uses repeatedly in his shows. The harmonies and intonations, flatter and more open sounding than the lush diatonic sound of classical choral music, give the feeling of a rough pioneer people gathering after a hard day’s work to reaffirm their faith. The audience’s attention rests placidly on the pastoral scene. We are now ready to view the gradual, overlapping entrances of the puppets, to look back and forth between groups the way one would look from birds to clouds to water in an ordinary landscape. From behind a hill comes a group of brown, tormented-looking figures, molded from papier-mâché, their carriers hidden behind them. Some are huge faces, some are whole bodies squatting, some are groups of twisted, leaning figures. Five minutes later, we can still see the original singers disappearing over the furthest hill, while the new group suddenly fills the center. The space is so large and takes so long to survey that we often miss the new elements until they are almost upon us, despite their glacial approach.
We see specific characters: the brown figures, shamans with green huts for hats, sheep and a shepherdess, a golden calf, Christopher Columbus. A story or rather several stories emerge: the sheep turn into soldiers, their shepherdess becomes a general. The brown figures become witnesses to a ritual slaughter. The Goddess falls and is replaced by the golden calf. The images yield many interpretations, some of them fairly obvious and others more difficult. The calf’s usurpation of the Goddess is surely the transition from Paganism to monotheism, but is the opposition of the soldiers to a group of children dressed as angels meant to show the opposition of military and civilian life? Speculating about the meaning of events becomes an active part of the pleasure of watching, keeping us occupied during the slow transformations, in much the way that one would speculate about buildings and figures while viewing any panorama.
Schumann uses sudden changes to emphasize some moments, such as when a performer flings a white sheet away, turning a winged horse into Christopher Columbus. In the midst of the pervasive slowness, it provokes laughter and renewed attention from the audience. When the Goddess suddenly sinks backward and is carried off, we become aware that despite her size and bright color, she had been in the center for so long that we had ceased to see either her or the puppeteers holding her up. Similarly, the sheep, a traveling element, approach the field for so long that they too are temporarily forgotten, accepted as a more or less permanent moving feature, until they are surprisingly reborn as soldiers.
As they daylight fades, the soldiers turn back to sheep and are slaughtered. Many Death figures appear, and eventually everything lies down and dies. it is dark and silent. The full moon has risen over the hills to our right. We see an absolutely enormous puppet, covering an entire hillside, a white redemptive angel with a huge wise, stern face and a flowing white fabric body, supported by a large group of puppeteers, sweeping slowly down off the hills towards us. Bells and drums play a repeated irregular rhythm. Across the angel’s face is written “Domestic Insurrection.” Her magnificent progress, as the bells sound from the distance, seems as ancient as the hills she comes from.
The immense span of her arms encloses and engulfs everything, the brown crowd puppets, the dead figures. Pitilessly, she sweeps away everything in her path, drawing applause. it is now completely dark. A torch in her hand is lit, and the arm is brought over to the golden calf, which she sets aflame The entire cast moves off with the angel down the road to the right, towards the rising moon. The flames and sparks reach high above our heads, the warmth itself welcome in the rapidly cooling Northern August night. Applause begins. As the last of the group disappears into the night, we see running towards us from the distant hills five enormous white gulls, held aloft on sticks by three performers each, the long tails flapping in the wind. The performers caw loudly, swooping down from the distance and circling the burning calf, then follow the angel off to the right. The pure liberating feeling at the moment is electric. The crowd whoops and yells, renews its applause, then surges down into the field and spontaneously forms a circle around the now dying fire. They sing, play drums, and generally party together for the next several hours. As a modern ritual of resurrection, the performance has clearly worked to create a sense of renewed hope for them.
The Pageant is a natural and coherent mode of performance which is different enough from other experimental work in the landscape to be called a new form of movement theater. Merce Cunningham, the Judson Church group of choreographers, and others danced in the streets to make their dances part of the ever-changing field of chance occurrences which makes up modern life, or used the rural landscape as a magnificent setting for visual fantasies. For Schumann, the landscape is not merely where the play takes place, but is itself the subject of the play, or rather the subject is the interaction between the landscape and his own sensibility.
It is not possible for an artist to compete with a landscape. The beauty of the natural world, the organic form, the sense above all of its reality, the fact that every leaf and pebble in the landscape is part of the ongoing life of the universe rather than a human artifact, all conspire to make it so that no puppet or mask, no movement or song, will ever appear as beautiful as the landscape in purely visual or sensual terms. Rather, the beauty of the art in the landscape must come from its specifically human qualities, the way it expresses our emotional responses to the landscape and our way of living on the land, in the way that only an artist can.
In his pageants, Schumann subordinates his own personal ideas to that of the landscape itself, seeking to express what is intrinsic to it. Looking at the landscape, he tries to discern what images, sounds, or characters seem natural to it, and his success is measured by the believability of the Pageants, that when then White Angel or Crowd of Brown Faces make their slow appearances, they seem to be an inevitable part of the landscape which Schumann is revealing. The best moments of the Pageant are so right for their time and place that we suspend our disbelief and accept that these events have just happened, that the five gulls flying down from the hills are exactly what we would expect to see. There is a magic correspondence between our dreams of the landscape and the fabric, poles, and puppeteers which make up our experience of the gulls’ flight. Of course, what Schumann is really responding to is his own inner landscape as mirrored in the exterior one, and the images he chooses reflect his personal concerns. Nevertheless, we can all see a far hill as a remote moment in history, a road from a forest as an emblem of nomadic life, a pine forest as the birthplace of Mother Earth. The net effect is to help us see into the landscape, rather than using it as a setting or competing with it for attention. Schumann’s outdoor work is designed to help us see, hear, and feel hidden qualities of the landscape that we might have missed unaided, in the same way that a Balanchine ballet can open up a piece of music and help us hear its inner structure. Thus, the ultimate object of our attention in the Pageant is never the figures or events in a landscape, but always the landscape itself, the whole composition, of which the figures and events form a part.
The rhythms, shapes and colors, too, are an expression of the landscape. The slowness, the long overlapping entrances and exits, the contrasts between huge and small figures, the use of wood, branches, fabric, the contrast between black and white characters and the brown and green ones, all come from the way the eye and ear observe the landscape. There is development and narrative, but it consists of several more or less permanent centers of interest, the field, the hills, the Goddess, the brown crowd, each evolving independently as well as interacting. The lulls, moments where there is no strong center of development or interest, seem a deliberate part of the timing, coinciding with our largely static experience of landscapes. It is also no accident that he chooses the hour of dusk, facing East. The action is lit frontally and so does not compete with the overwhelming extravagance of the sunset, yet it is the time of day when the changing of the light is most easily seen. The rising of the moon, too, is used precisely. The August performances are scheduled each year to coincide with the full moon, and the second performance is delayed by a few minutes to compensate for a different rising time.
The Pageants are superb constructs of time, space, and color. They can be experienced both as abstract collages of movement in space and as narrative meditations on nature, technology, and American imperialism. Indeed, the first night that I saw the 1990 Pageant I experienced it as an entrancing hallucination of moving figures and music in a Vermont landscape. When I saw it again the second night, I found in the identical spectacle a spiritual history of the United States, with highly specific references in each of the images, including a Russian Revolution (people in red jumping around on one of the most distant hills) and the turn of the century immigration from Europe (shabbily dressed masked figures arriving from one of the nearer hills). Viewers’ interpretations of the images did not agree on all the details, but most people I asked did have an interpretation.
Just as the performance reveals the landscape, the landscape reinforces the story. The moonlight and increased darkness highlight the ritual burning of the calf, the remoteness of the red dancers on the further hills echoes the remoteness of the Russian Revolution for Americans. Schumann opens up a dialog between outer and inner landscapes in which they continually comment on one another.
In one way, Schumann’s subordination of his personal vision to that of the landscape makes the pageants less powerful than his indoor pieces. Watching a pageant can be a breathtaking amplification of watching the Vermont landscape. It can be a journey into our collective historical subconscious, into the landscape of American aspirations and nightmares, as illuminated by Schumann’s foreign perspective. But in his best indoor pieces, the gently suffering mask-faces and the simple human stories are presented unmediated by the landscape. When, in Columbus I, Native women whose children have been murdered take pieces of rope and twist them around their necks to hang themselves from a Spirit Tree, while the performers slip invisibly offstage, the brown masks look unbearably sad as they sway from the tree. This image, so reminiscent of Southern lynchings, is one of the many examples of Schumann’s success in re-elevating puppet theater to the heights of tragedy it achieves in Asian cultures. he strips away our layers of rationalization and reveals human suffering in all its stark simplicity. This feeling of a struggled-for simplicity (one of his pieces is called That Simple Light May Arise from Complicated Darkness) can never be truly achieved in the complex splendor of the natural landscape. While the Pageants fill us with a sense of awe and give us an overview of human history, their diffusion prevents them from having the concentrated emotional power of the indoor pieces. Schumann’s Pageants, made almost every year in the same site since 1975, are a tribute to a magnificently inspiring place, like Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, but at the same time they necessarily preclude his expression of themes other than this landscape.
The Bread and Puppet Museum is a vast, multilevel old dairy barn stuffed to the rafters with installations created out of puppets and masks and paintings from past shows. Walking through it, one sees that the expressiveness of Schumann’s art is not in the illusion of real faces, but in the thrust of the work; the way the emotion of a character is felt all at once. The joy, sadness, or angry scream depicted becomes a specific kind of facial distortion, aided by the choice of medium and technique, celastic, silkscreen, papier-mâché relief, etc. Although there are dozens of versions of each subject, say, paintings of a chair or a sunset, one feels somehow that each of these tossed-off improvisations is the perfect one.
They typical Schumann mask is a closed face, eyelids hooded, inwardly serene or pained or wise. A whole series of masks has half or more of the face in deep shadow. Their uneven surfaces hint at a multitude of shifting emotions beneath. The Columbus mask, for example, has a strong overall personality to it, that of an inspired and somewhat poetic, zealous explorer, but it somehow manages to look different as the performer moves his head in relation to his body and the scene, looking reverent as he gazes upward in prayer, severe as he glowers and points at his crew, pitying as he reaches towards a Christ figure. One almost feels, as the mask turns, that the play of light on the uneven surface resembles the passing of emotion over a real face.
Schumann has created a unique performing style to match his masks. This is theater without acting. All text, whether passionate or not, is stated matter-of-factly, with the emphasis on clarity and sense only. This style makes the text more like the masks; that is, it makes the sentences into static objects to be interpreted rather than expressions of fluid emotion as in most theater. The masks are not alive and do not change. Their expression is in the representational energy of their color and form. An emotional acting style would compete with the masks by calling attention to their deadness. An unemotional delivery allows us the see the masks and the text as equal elements in the story.
The large, rigid body parts of the puppets dictate a movement style at once simplified and enlarged, a style which contributes to the impression that we are watching archetypes, not particular Native women or policemen, but their essences. Schumann’s work has the esthetic, common in Eastern puppet theaters, of simple effects which charm through their evocativeness and the performer’s skill, like waving a blue scarf to create a river. Virtually all of Schumann’s staging consists of single actions, simply performed, to the accompaniment of rhythmically precise music which reinforces the action or creates a mood. The music and the single focus of the action are pointers, part of the general simplification of everything into allegory. Reading the stage is like reading a book: one voice speaks at a time, but the elements of the text remain visible throughout the scene.
The reduction of characters to their essences is what makes this a political theater. One feels, in the Brechtian sense, that the reality of social forces, money, prejudice, technology, is a living force in the lives of the characters. Masks, unable to represent the changing inner life of individuals, are perfect vehicles for unchanging generalizations such as Grief, Fear, or Hunger. The large groups needed to operate the bigger puppets further deemphasize the personal and stress the collective experience.
Schumann’s shows integrate seemingly irreconcilable opposites. They are both abstract and narrative, pagan and Christian (as in the resurrection of the Earth Goddess), avant-garde and popular. In the 1990 circus, when three large squares of fabric, green, blue and red, entered the field, carried from underneath by crowds of people, he added a large face of a matching color on top of each square. By making the colored squares into characters in a story, he transformed the elite esthetic of a Mondrian canvas into a popular form, which drew applause from the whole crowd. The shows almost always appeal to children and adults on different levels, such as the scene from the afternoon circus which adults can see as a parable on the national deficit while the kids see a fun magic trick with a disappearing bird. A typical Schumann mask combines several moods, is both defiant and afraid, or shy and serene. The shows are both political and spiritual, as in Metropolitan Indian Report when the homeless man’s ashcan fire becomes a Hopi sun god. The pageant is both a symbolic representation and an effective ritual of regeneration for the audience. And of course the political beliefs of the company are integrated into their communal life and work style, the bread the make, and into the shows, and thereby shared with the audience, which is why the company is called Bread and Puppet.
The most unusual show at the 1991 circus was the latest version of the Insurrection Oratorio, first shown in 1983. Performed about an hour after the full moon rose, on a road and a narrow strip of dirt in front of a white wall of fabric, painted with images and text from an old production (it usually serves as an offstage area in the Pageant), it was one of the only sparsely attended shows, watched by about 25 people, the same number as the cast.
Performers, not all wearing white, gathered one by one in the dark in front of the wall, eventually forming a line, waiting, making little ‘nothing’ sounds and gestures, sniffles, scratches, which very gradually build up in intensity and speed, so that the piece has been going on for almost 20 minutes before the audience understands that anything at all is being performed. The sounds and actions slowly change, to rubbing dust in the road, shaking pebbles on a sheet, whispering, reading text from the wall, laughing. The performers never change in unison but always in slow waves, a few at a time. The group splits apart like an amoeba into subgroups, dancing up the hill behind the wall, shaking a tree behind the audience. The only light other than the moonlight is from a single torch. There are no puppets, no masks, no plot, only the most intangible suggestion of political content, when the crowd knocks on the wall, wanting to be let through, like an insurrection which builds from individual discontent gradually into a mass will. In this primarily musical piece, the sound has the same esthetic as the masks, no convincing mastery of notes and rhythms, but a clarity in the gestural thrust of the sound, which show the intent and feeling behind it. It is delightful to see an artist work so experimentally at an age when many artists are content to repeat what they already know. Lit only by the torch which the Goddess brought at the end of the Pageant, it reminded me of a strange kind of hidden nocturnal activity, like what insects and creatures do when we are all asleep, or like the beginnings of a political uprising being organized in the shadows.
My articles on experimental film are freely available to all, but are supported by monthly and annual donations from readers. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. Thank you.