Dada and Circus: "Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre"

Author(s): Franoise Kourilsky

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 18, No. 1, Popular Entertainments (Mar., 1974), pp. 104109
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144868 .
Accessed: 18/07/2011 10:28
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Drama Review:
TDR.

http://www.jstor.org

Peter Schumann's Breadand Puppet Theatre

Dada

and

Circus

Puppeteers are Carnival people,

conceived at country fairs, born in garbage cans, married to dancing
bears. . .-Peter Schumann1
The Bread and Puppet Theatre2 has often been described as a street theatre
whose desire is to reach a popular audience. Often this has meant performing in
streets, parks, and city ghettos, doing anti-war parades, setting up workshops in poor
neighborhoods, or building puppets with children and getting them involved in the
preparation of a show. However, along with these outdoor performances, they have
always done indoor shows. There are obvious differences between a "chamber play"
such as Fire, played in a specific area before a limited number of spectators, and a
street piece like A Man Says Good-bye to His Mother: Although both plays have the
same "subject" (the war in Vietnam), the first one conveys the story by the form itself-movements, sounds, colors, volumes, etc.-and it is, in a way, the spectator's job
to "read" it through all the assembled elements. In the second, the story is directly

'Poland,May 1972, p. 3. Unless otherwise indicated, all Schumannquotes are from personal interviews,particularlymy interviewwith him in September1973.
2Forbackgroundmaterialon the Breadand PuppetTheatre,see: FrancoiseKourilsky'sbook Le
Breadand Puppet Theatre(Lausanne:EditionsLaCite, 1971),as well as the following issues of
TheDramaReview:T38,T47,and T55.
The title photograph by Oleg Kalinowskiand Jim Hoffman is of Our Domestic Resurrection
Circus,October 1970.

DADA AND CIRCUS

105

told to the audience by a narrator.Does that mean there is a polarity between the
denser indoor shows and the simpler outdoor shows? Are the indoor shows more
"avant-garde," attracting those connoisseurs who are fond of "experimental" art,
while the outdoor shows-borrowing from such forms as carnivals, circus, and
pageants-appeal to a "popular"audience? Schumanncomments:
Yes, we are doing stuff that is as concentrated as Simple Light3or
Fire and stuff as bulky and as minimal in content as Trouble or
Hallelujah.But it wouldn't be fairto say that we are doing two kinds
of shows. We certainly try for one thing, and it's just very hard to
marrythese contrasts,to get them into a piece. There are shows like
Simple Lightthat probably also want to be as simple or as good as a
street show and don't quite succeed. The materialused is too complicated, the forms are too abstractand too pure to lend themselves
easily to the streets, even though I would like very much to perform
Simple Light outside as a street show. We are trying to stay pure in
our vision and in the forms we are using, but on the other hand we
want to be sure that we don't get stuck in a cold, abstract art atmosphere that doesn't convey anything to anybody but a good intellectual friend. Certainly we want to be broader. So we try for
simplification,or you might call it open-heartedness. Story is something we are very much searching for, but we don't startwith it. We
are starting from forms-pure muscial and movement ideas-and
then we proceed slowly to something that, we feel, becomes understandable, becomes communicable. That contradicts the idea of
those two ways of theatre.
In fact, there is no fundamental difference between the way Peter Schumann
worked in Germanyduring the mid-fiftieswith his New Dance Group and the way he
works with the Bread and Puppet Theatre. There is no hiatus between the first
abstract shows he put on, (which started from stage elements that were assembled,
regrouped, and amplified, and graduallygrew into something like a play)and what he
is doing now. Schumann agrees that he was influenced by OskarSchlemmer and the
Bauhauspeople. If one reads The Theatreof the Bauhaus,4this relationship becomes
clearer (theatre as an art form; the man being employed on an equal footing with the
other formative media; the use of masks, the automaton, and the marionette, etc.).
And, of course, Schlemmer "had some wishful thinking about popular entertainment. He made definitions of what could be done on the stage, and popular
entertainment played a part in his system." Schumann adds that he also feels very
close to KurtSchwittersand his concept of the Merz Stage Piece,5a relationshipthat is
3ThatSimple LightMay Rise Out of Complicated Darknesswas firstperformed in the Haybarnat
Goddard College in November 1972, and then at St. Clement's Church in New York City in
December 1972. It has since been toured in New Englandand Europe.
4O. Schlemmer, L.Moholy-Nagy, F. Molnar. The Theatreof the Bauhaus.Introductionby Walter
Gropius.WesleyanUniversityPress,1961.
"I"ncontrast to the dramaor the opera, all partsof the Merz Stage Piece are inseparablybound
up together; it cannot be written, read or listened to, it can only be produced in the theatre. Up
until now, a distinction was made between stage-set, text, and score in theatricalperformances.
Eachfactor was separatelypreparedand could also be separatelyenjoyed. The Merz stage knows
only the fusing of all factors into a composite work. Materialsfor the stage-set are all solid, liquid,
and gaseous bodies, such as white wall, man, barbed wire entanglement, blue distance, light
cone.... Materialsfor the score are all tones and noises capable of being produced by violin,

106

FRANCOISE
KOURILSKY

evident in the role given to chance in the composition of a piece. So Schumann did
not suddenly move from abstractforms to a more literaryand traditionaltheatre. In
fact, he does not see them as opposites, as his views on puppetry make clear. Although he was impressed by the Sicilian puppets, he feels closer to the Bunraku;the
Sicilian puppet show, he feels, "is reallystory theatre, not compositional work," as in
Bunraku.What makes the Japanese puppet theatre so attractiveto Schumann is "the
incredibly contrasted, completely unmarriedideas that are put forwardto create the
communication: namely the interference of narrationand musician with what happens visually,the order of separateness and coming together of these different stages.
It creates such a broad spectrum. That same kind of ambition is very much in the
Bread and Puppet Theatre: to try to use the most possible unmarried and uncombined means-any garbage can, any music, anything we can find, any smallness
or bigness-and get a communication out of it, not by creating atmosphere and
moods and dialogues and tales, but by leaving these things as pure as they can be and
eventually touching them together, bringingthem reallytogether." Whatattractshim
to the Sicilianpuppets is the way that they are involved with language:
In the Sicilian puppet show, when the Pope is sick, the sickness
comes flying down from the ceiling in the form of dots of blood and
lands on him. When the sickness is taken away by the doctor, these
spots are painted a different color and taken away in a bag. The
translationof the language is so detailed, so real. We don't have that
anymore. We call it symbolism nowadays when somebody does
that, but that isn't symbolism. It's the nature of real language to do
that, to make something understandable,to detail something to the
point that it is very clear. But we don't dare to use real language.
Our language is only a destroyed small portion of language. We are
inhibited by all the implications that we have learned in school, by
all the sciences. But we are looking for it, for a real communicable
language.
It is wrong to think of Schumann'swork in terms of two different "lines," such as
the movements of the DadaistTheatre of Surprises,the abstracttheatre of Schlemmer,
Happenings, and the New Dance on the one hand, and the traditionalforms of folk
art and popular entertainment on the other. In fact, it has been pointed out that Happenings, fairs, pageants, and circus have a common "nondiegetic (from the Greek
diegesis, a story told) structuringof time and space."6And Michael Kirbyhas shown
that Happenings and circus appear to be particularlyclose to each other (nonmatrixed performing, nonacting, noninformational structure, strong environmental aspects).7 Schumann, in describing the structure of the new version of Our Domestic
Resurrection Circus that he is planning for this year, calls to mind the compartmentalized structure of Happenings, based on the arrangement and continuity of

drum, trombone, sewing machine, grandfather clock, stream of water, etc. Materials for the text
are all experiences that provoke the intelligence and emotions. The materials are not to be used
logically in their objective relationships, but only within the logic of the work of art. The more
intensively the work of art destroys rational objective logic, the greater become the possibilities
of artistic building....
Take in short everything from the hair net of the high class lady to the
propeller of the S. S. Leviathan, always bearing in mind the dimensions required by the work."
Kurt Schwitters in an article on the Merz Stage Piece in Strumbuhne, Berlin, 8, Folgo, 1918.
'See Darko Suvin, "Reflections on Happenings," in The Drama Review, vol. 14, N. 3 (T 47), p. 134.
7Michael Kirby, The Art of Time, Dutton, 1969, p. 84.

DADA AND CIRCUS

107

separate theatrical units. He spoke of a "cycle type of thing," where instead of a single
theatre piece, the members of the troupe will work on "pieces on problems, pieces
on no problems, pieces on simple facts of life, pieces on politics, pieces that have to
do with birth or death, or people's affairsand jobs, etc., and all these single pieces
could then be placed inside a largerframework:at the beginning, a big piece on Beginning, then pieces in the middle, and in the end, a piece about End."
Actually, there is a constant feedback in Schumann's work between all these
forms. They are part of his background, of his interior, imaginaryworld. For him,
circus and Dada are on a level beyond esthetics. As a child, he was fascinated by the
circus: "The circus was a way of life that, compared to the life of the bourgeoisie, was
almost as outside the-civilized world as the world of the Gypsies-and it was a complete other world. That was the attraction of the circus...

." This idea of a marginal

world outside "normal"social life can be found in Dada as well: Forinstance, Schwitters' famous Merzbau in Germany, which the Nazis destroyed, was in its own way a
"complete other world." The papier-mache cathedral that Peter Schumann is
building in Vermont, covering the walls of the Cate Farmbarnwith a varietyof masks
and sculptures, recallsSchwitters'Merzbau.
Although there is no real dichotomy in Schumann's work, there is an evolution
from a show that is meant to be a "creation in itself" to a theatre that makes sense to
people. Schumann states that "Now we constantly verify our plays: Are they understandable?To what point? And we try to make them simple and clear." That is the
reason why Schumann says that he does not feel related to "Happenings people,"
even if he still refers to his work with Yvonne Rainer at Merce Cunningham's studio
shortly after he arrivedfrom Germany in 1961.8"Their[Happeningspeople] work is a
work of intensity, and for me there is a difference between a work like theirs that
constantly intensifies itself in itself, and a work that deliberately gives up that intensity
for the sake of a communal act, for the sake of doing it with others for others."
The concept of theatre as a communal act separatesSchumann from some avantgarde artistsand brings him closer to circus people. The circus is-or ratherwas-a
kind of traveling,self-supporting commune that embodied an alternate mode of existence. The Bread and Puppet Theatre is based on a communal spirit-making things,
baking bread, building puppets, and putting on shows. The group is trying to live off
what it produces with little outside financialaid. Theirtheatre style is inseparablefrom
their lifestyle; they have established an alternativeway of existing today in the United
States.
ForSchumann,today's commercial circus is very unsatisfying:
It's a very empty business of superlatives that are added to each
other to create some kind of tickle that people don't need for their
lives. It says something that is not very useful anymore. It is proven
that the mass media, TV,movies, Hollywood and the big magazines
in this country do a much better job on superlativesthan any circus
can.
Schumann feels that theatre can do better than "RinglingBrotherswith its three rings
and dozens of acrobatsall doing the same thing at the same time":
Our Domestic Resurrection Circus9will be an effort to find a new
way of doing circus that is more human, that is not merely a
"Schumannattended a concert by John Cage in Germanyin 1960.He discovered many ideas that
he himself had tried to put into practice-free use of sounds, acrobatics, jokes, etc. This
"meeting" with Cage prompted him to plan to leave for the United States.
O9urDomestic ResurrectionCircus was first performed by The Bread and Puppet Theatre on
Cate FarmMeadow in September 1970. In Februaryand March of 1971,they took the piece to
Boston, Rhode Island,and Ohio.

108

FRANCOISE KOURILSKY

collection of superlatives, of extraordinaryfeats arbitrarilymixed

together, but something that becomes a story of the world circus.
We don't use circus techniques: the heaviest acrobaticsdone in our
circus is a somersault. Or the horse is done by somebody putting on
a horse mask.In that respect, it's only a parody of a circus. In the first
version, there was clowning and some slapstick stuff; we had motorcycles and cars and whatever was around. I guess that the circus
we do is a little bit like the gigantic pageants performed all over the
United States on pieces of Americanhistory,although I haven't seen
them. It has to do with just creating a big outside attraction for the
people in the area. It'sa 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 riversand 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!"
The first version of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was like a history of America,
ending with the war in Vietnam. Schumann does not know if they will keep it in the
new version, but it will certainly have to do with "demonstratingthe whole world: for
the whole world has to be demonstrated anew; men and women are stuck in the oneway development of our century."10
"People are not tied up by religious symbols or by any existing mythology anymore, so they have no real language. What we are looking for finally is a language, a
mythology that is to everybody's understanding."
Is this search for a fundamental, unified language a desperate and hopeless
business in our divided society? Can "organ-grinders,circus directors, poets, lutists,
magicians, tightrope walkers, dramatists,conductors, prophets, hobby-horse inventors, and all the folks that help produce big eternal nonsense"1' reallywin? InSimple
Light, when circus people, clowns, acrobats, and musicians enter at the end of the
show, their cheerfulness does not sound real. They bring with them the image of a
world which is dead or dying. The impression is the same at the end of Grey LadyCantata No. 2: Suddenly, after the death of the Grey Lady,a group of "rejoicing" ladies
and gentlemen in fancy dress enter and blast out a song; then, the Grey Ladygets up
and dances with the BlackAngel. At the end of Grey LadyCantataNo. 3, just after the
Grey Ladyhas "lost" her baby, she claps her hands, and the snow startsfalling. It is like
saying to the audience: "We theatre people, or circus people, bring you joy and
music and white and snow and light, but it's a trick, look at how we do it, it's only a
show, it's not real."
"Something is demonstrated in the show," agrees Schumann, "and then at the
end, instead of staying with the demonstration, we say-obviously we are just actors.
It's like pouring water on what was done, it's like taking away the impression that
people may have collected and saying, okay, this is the end of the theatre piece. That
is also what the narratoris used for in Simple Light, to constantly step into that development and to say 'the spectacle' so that the person doesn't get too involved with
it and has a chance to step out of it. I think what Brechttries to do with his manner of
speech in theatre would be what people call 'Verfremdungseffekt.'But in this case, it
is done with simple means, with more directness."
By insisting on the alienation effect, Schumann shows to what extent the desire
for demonstration is inherent in his theatre: there is alwaysa "narrator"or a "barker"
in the indoor shows as well as the outdoor shows. But,on the other hand, it should be
"'Poland, March 1970, p. 4.
""Poisons, Worries, Screams" in Poland, May 1972, p. 18.

DADA AND CIRCUS

109

pointed out that although the framework of "popular entertainment" is still present
in the indoor shows the "techniques" are used in a much more sophisticated manner.
The narratoris no longer a person who just tells the story. He becomes a "character,"
such as the "Ritz-Carlton"in Simple Light, who just "barks"-literally speaking-to
announce a new section. He yells without pronouncing any word, and turns pages
from The New York Times. He does not really display a comprehensible sign to the
audience. There is a sort of "de-construction," or reversal, of the techniques borrowed from popular spectacles: one might talk in terms of a parody on a fair barker's
style. And this, in turn, might be related to the more pessimistic"meaning" of certain
indoor shows.
This is the point of view of a critic looking at a show without being involved in the
creative process. Schumann himself insists that he is not a person who analyzes beforehand which form is the most useful and then uses it. He is not a managerof styles:
"It is the doing that interests me and not the achieving of something." He adds that he
finds the very term "popular entertainment" suspicious. "It suggests we are tryingto
appeal to mass audiences. It is not true, even if I would like to be attractiveto people
who live around here [Vermont] and not only to Goddard students." He does not
agree with the terms popular and unpopular. "In fact it is the same thing that a piece
of drama,a piece of Beckett, a piece of Shakespeare,or a piece of an Oldenburg Happening, or circus or carnival wants to do to people. It is uncriticalto define that as
something as flat as the word entertainment means. 'Entertainment'has a bias inside
it, it is sort of the dress-up of it, and the appeal, and the success of that appeal.... It is
hard to find the word for it, to say what makes people do these things. I don't know. I
think people need to be attached to each other."
And the mass media today cannot do that. Even an amusement park such as
Coney Islandcannot do it. When the Breadand PuppetTheatrewas working at Coney
Island12theirtheatre was part of the amusement park. It was open to all the people.
The troupe ran workshops with children and old folks and performed pageants
throughout the park with their big dragon. Fromthe small bandstand in front of the
theatre, they called to the passing crowds in barkerstyle: "Come on in! Free puppet
show in ten minutes."
"Free" ... Today's forms of popular entertainment have become just as commercial as the mass media and serve as a means of manipulatingthe audience in the
direction useful to the moneymakers. Thus, even though the Bread and Puppet
Theatre was part of the amusement park and the puppeteers had relationswith other
Coney Islandshowmen, their goal and their work were radicallydifferent:
Some showmen came, they wanted stuff from us, painting, etc., and
they taught us some tricks-fire spitting and sword swallowing. But
they were pretty corrupt moneymakers, not very nice to deal with.
They were certainly better at their things because they were out for
commercialism, so their attraction was well defined to the point
where people would come and buy this. We don't have that goal. If
you don't have that goal, you end up with volunteers. It's very
different. The audience is not the same. People came to us because
they wanted to relax from the other things.
One has to have attended a performance of Mississippiand heard the silence at
the end of the play, which contrasted so violently with the brouhaha outside, to
realize the impact the Bread and Puppet shows can have on a "popular" audience,
and by the same token understand why Peter Schumann dislikes the term "entertainment," which implies a kind of superficial pleasure, "meant for the skin." Theatre
is more like bread, "meant for the stomach." It is more like a necessity.
21n 1970, the Bread and Puppet Theatre played in Coney Island in an old theatre on Surf Avenue.