Giant papier-mâché puppets and free bread, carrying a homespun radical politics of the commons into the street.
Bread and art belong to the same category of necessity — and both should be given away, not sold.
Bread and Puppet Theater began in 1963 when Peter Schumann, a German émigré sculptor and dancer, started staging silent, ritualized street performances with towering papier-mâché figures in a Lower East Side loft — handing out free home-baked sourdough rye to everyone who watched.
The name names the doctrine: bread and art belong to the same category of necessity, and both should be given away rather than sold. Over six decades the company has moved from tenement lofts to anti-war marches to a Vermont hill farm, but has never abandoned its founding wager — that giant, crude, hand-built figures performing myth, scripture, and current atrocity in silence or brass-band noise can do more moral work than polished, ticketed theatre.
Art should be as cheap and essential as bread — made and shared communally.
Giant puppetry and pageant carry a radical, anti-war politics of the commons into public space. The bread is not a metaphor for the art; the bread is the art, and it is passed hand to hand until it is gone.
Art should be as cheap and essential as bread, made and shared communally — giant puppetry and pageant carrying a radical, anti-war politics of the commons into public space.
A long-lived troupe-commune around Peter Schumann, sustaining itself through volunteer pageants and a "cheap art" ethic from a Vermont farm.
It defined protest puppetry and pageant worldwide; its giant figures became a standard vocabulary of demonstrations from the anti-war era to the anti-globalization movement.
“Giant beautiful puppets plus free bread — a self-renewing commune turning radical politics into shared public ritual.”
Still performing from Vermont, its puppet-and-pageant language a permanent fixture of street protest.
Coded from public web sources (Wikipedia-led); high confidence, not yet independently verified. No photographs are used on this page — the imagery here is drawn entirely in ink and paper, in the company's own cheap-art spirit.