In Praise of Street Theatre, colorful costumes and humor as War Protest

[cali]

I'm not a huge devotee of CodePink, though I appreciate their pov, but I want to take a minute to pay homage to the best street theatre/protest company, this country- no wait a sec- the world has ever produced.

A month ago or so the NYT ran a front page Sunday Arts section story with photos on Bread & Puppet.

I've had the pleasure of marching with them (all you need to do is wear white), and of being in the Pageant. (helping to hold up one of the giant birds)

Here's a bit from the long NYT article:

<snip>

I have another association with the troupe: Bread and Puppet gave me the single most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in a theater. That was in 1982, in the sloping, wide-open field that is part of the theater’s farm in Glover, Vt. There the collective was presenting a two-day festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, as it had done almost every summer since relocating from the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.

The circus, a bunch of political skits, concerts and vaudeville acts, took place in the afternoon, and it was fun. (The troupe’s Lincoln Center appearance will follow more or less this format, on a smaller scale.) Then at sunset came the pageant, a kind of morality play told in epic visual terms. During Vietnam the themes had been specific. Wrongs had a name and a solution: Stop the war. By the 1980s the issues had become many and complicated — threatened nature, global consumerism, nuclear dangers — and remedies far less sure. The 1982 pageant had an odd tone, brusque and apocalyptic. It opened with a bucolic scene: little cutout houses and trees carried onto the field, followed by puppets of dancing cows. Villagers in masks arrived, milked the cows, settled down to bed, woke up, had children who within minutes had children of their own. This was ordinary life set to haunting music: vigorous, low-church American folk hymns from the 19th-century collection “The Sacred Harp.”

Suddenly four dark puppet horses with devil riders wheeled in from afar, backed by a huge dragon. Almost without warning the devils waved black banners over the villagers, who fell to the ground, dead. The devils then piled the houses and horses together and set them alight. Good and evil alike were in flames. Moral chaos. End of story.

But not quite. As the fire burned, a half-dozen great white gulls or cranes — muslin kites carried on sticks by runners — soared up from the horizon and started flying in our direction. They came right to the flames and soared over them as if looking for signs of life. Then they circled back across the field, melting into darkness. It was fantastic. Only when they were out of sight did I see that night had fallen and stars were out. It felt like an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle. I had been simultaneously transported and pulled back to earth.

<snip>

And although he is personally a star — the theater historian Stefan Brecht calls him, with cause, one of the great artists of the 20th century — Mr. Schumann has kept faith with the redemptive politics of the everyday, of shared ordinariness.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/theater/05cott.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5088&en=c494a9c6ce54acb9&ex=1343966400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss