March 2, 2006

Interview by ROSETTE ROYALE
Staff Reporter

Here’s a simple recipe for those interested in joining the fight for social justice:

Add cornstarch to boiling water until it makes a thick paste. Cool. As mixture cools, tap into your personal passion for tackling global issues, such as war profiteering, the growing corporate domination in national politics, or the escalating destruction of the environment. Then dip heavy paper strips into cooled mixture. Build a figure with pasty paper strips that embodies your beliefs. Let dry. Decorate as necessary. Hit the streets.

It’s this simple recipe that Bread & Puppet has used to feed the spirits of hundreds of thousands of spectators around the world for nearly 40 years. Under the stewardship of founder and director Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet has been a visually striking mainstay in the battle to dismantle the dominant paradigm.

Schumann (who declares: “I am 71, going strongly on 72”) is a Polish émigré who brought his training in sculpture, music, and dance to the United States in the early ‘60s. Shortly after his arrival, he and others were maneuvering papier-mâché creations into New York’s avenues for outdoor performances. The troupe moved to Vermont in 1970, settling eventually, in Glover, a small town set near the Canadian border. From this outpost, the theater staged its Domestic Resurrection Circus. An annual event that drew, as the years progressed, crowds of 30,000 to 40,000, the Circus was a weekend experience of (often large-scale) puppet performances, passion plays and free oven-baked breads. The death of a spectator in a neighboring campground in 1998 led Schumann to end the Circus. His commitment to socially conscious puppetry, however, never waned.

Such commitment will be on display for local theatergoers when Schumann and Bread & Puppet — recipients of an Obie and a Puppeteers of America Award, among others — come to Seattle next week with a new show. Entitled “Daughter Courage,” the piece is based upon the letters of Rachel Corrie, an Olympia resident who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003. Corrie, then 23 and a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, was peacefully protesting the bulldozer’s imminent destruction of a Palestinian home at the time of her death. Prior to the troupe’s arrival, Schumann, speaking by phone from Glover, VT, talked about Corrie’s significance, the power of theater, and the salvation offered by a good piece of bread.

Real Change: How would you describe Bread & Puppet?

Peter Schumann: Well, we essentially are politically engaged theatre. We have themes that have directly to do with the current state of affairs. But on the whole we see ourselves as cultural workers. Our work is in the field of cultural changes. Our attacks are not even so much on the political plane than on the cultural plane. We attack, this year, capitalist culture and our fight is our Papier-Mâché Revolution. We call ourselves papier-mâché insurrectionists.

RC: So your weaponry is papier-mâché, but also incorporated into your performances is music.

Schumann: Oh, yeah, we do lots of music. We do jazz; we also compose and make up a band with home-built instruments and a mix of classical instruments. We sing very traditional stuff, for example, sacred harp or shape-note singing: it is an East Coast fashion of 18th- 19th–century singing, with four-part harmonies. It is very beautiful. The music is all very Christian, but we are not. We are misusing the Christian religion for our purposes.

RC: Another aspect noticeable in seeing your performances is the involvement of the community. What is the role of community in your work?

Schumann: When you produce a piece of music, a piece of puppet show or theatre, you sort of export it into the community. That’s one thing. But to work with your neighbors on it and to have them in on the discussion while you do what you do, and to pick a theme that resounds in their brains as well as in our own, and to go through all the steps of making it from scratch to the end result: that is an involvement very different. Even if there wouldn’t be an audience, the thing would totally make sense. It doesn’t even depend on getting an audience because it would have its audience built into itself. In Seattle, we are expecting to work with 40 volunteers. We will be the instigators and the choreographers and music leaders and so on, but the actual performing will be mainly local people.

RC: So what was it about Rachel Corrie’s story that made you think it would resonate with theatre viewers?

Schumann: Well, the general situation in Palestine has been on our heels for a long time. When you talk about Palestinian suffering, I think you get shut off right away, but as soon as there was an American involved… I had a personal reason for wanting to do this story and that was that my daughter, a couple of years before Rachel Corrie’s tragic going there, entered the same program doing the same thing that Rachel did, and came luckily home unhurt. So when I heard and learned about Rachel Corrie, it struck a chord for me personally. But we decided on our show as a group and people were taken by this story immediately. We did several different versions of work memorializing Corrie’s fate. The first one was an exhibit. This is a new production, much more elaborate.

RC: How?

Schumann: The first part is — Maybe I should wait until you hear the introduction to this piece. [Begins reading.] “Palestine is an ice-cold reality under the feet of the occupiers. Palestine is homelessness that results from the gestures of politicians. Palestine is a giant body arrested, crushed, and rises up and lives. Rachel Corrie is the correct symbol of opposition to the occupation in the country of sponsorship of that occupation.” But her presence [in the production] is in her own words, taken from one of her last communications with her parents. So it is about Palestine, and the first part is a white stage, snow-like and ice-like, dipped into ice and snow, with puppets going through the days of the week, Monday through Sunday, snowing though each of the very short scenes. And that is interspersed with readings of Rachel Corrie’s letter.

RC: Have you had any communication with her parents?

Schumann: No. I hope to meet them there. I saw them on the [video] clip when they introduced the exhibit when it went to Olympia.

RC: You said it is very easy for people here in America to close their eyes and shut their ears when they hear that someone died in Palestine. But when it’s an American who dies, their eyes and ears perk up and open —

Schumann: Maybe we hope so. (Chuckles.)

RC: So we have Rachel Corrie helping us see the conflicts between Palestine and Israel. In the United States, we are coming up on the three-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. Is there anything theatre can do to address that situation?

Schumann: Yes, totally, we are responsible to do that. We have to. We do it by going in the street and protesting, and by creating sculpture and puppetry and music for protest that speaks to the streets and the officers who live in those streets and walk in them. But the main thing is that politics are people. Unless you get people turned on and unless you get into the brains of people and make them see things differently, there is no change. The talking about it, the displaying of it, finding words or music or sculpture or painting and puppetry, that brings it to people on a different level than that of the newspaper. The jargon that is used [by newspapers]: that is washed out and doesn’t do its job, obviously, because things are just going down the hill.

RC: How can theatre help bring these points across, say, in a way that is different from another visual medium, such as film?

Schumann: Oh, I think theatre is so much more powerful. Film, it is a gleam, a little flicker in front of the eyes. There is not much to it: you are in a room with anonymous audience members and you watch with them this thing pretending to be imminent, but always it is faking. It is just a flicker, presented by the power of electricity. It is like comparing an earphone to the sound of the symphony orchestra. You have to step in front of people and give them a chance to argue your opera, or whatever it is. So that is my take on it.

RC: How did you find the name Bread & Puppet?

Schumann: Oh, my wife told me that I have to call it that.

RC: Why?

Schumann: Because it is so obvious: I am a bread baker and we give out bread during the shows and we do puppet shows. So she said, “That’s the logic.”

RC: What is the importance of bread in life?

Schumann: Well, bread is the staff of life. Anyway, the old bread is. The bread you buy in the store is not. But the habit of bread baking — which I have picked up and learned from my mother — I, as a kid, never ate other bread than what she baked. And when we were kids, we were refugees. We went gleaning the fields for the grain. We ground it with our hands in the little coffee mill and all the rest. It is a sourdough rye bread. When we go on tour, we try to find 400 bricks to build a brick oven [in which to bake the bread.] I understand that in Seattle we couldn’t get the fire permit to do it. We heat the oven for an hour and a half and then we can bake a dozen loaves in there. That is how bread is made and it is important because it is an original, sustainable food. I have tried it out. I have hiked with only my mother’s bread in my bag, and you can live on it. (Pause.) If you chew it long enough.

RC: You said you were a refugee?

Schumann: I was born in Silesia, which was German. It became Polish in 1945, after the war. It was part of Germany that was given to Poland by the Yalta Conference. Ninety-nine percent of the population of Silesia was made into refugees at the end of the War and we were part of that 99 percent. We were all looking for a new life, so we live as refugees for a few years. Then I came to the States in 1961.

RC: In speaking with one of your troupe-members, he mentioned that there may have been government officials who have come to your workshop to see what you were doing.

Schumann: It was said on NPR that we are under surveillance.

RC: Do you think that’s possible?

Schumann: In this administration, I think anything is possible. I am totally amazed I am not on the guillotine yet. Look what they do to people — oh, my God! — all around the globe. It is horrifying.

RC: So Bread & Puppet started in 1962 and —

Schumann: And there has been no change in politics!

RC: So why do you keep doing it?

Schumann: We think: maybe tomorrow. We think: since we didn’t succeed yesterday, it doesn’t mean we won’t succeed tomorrow. I am pretty sure our officials are close to suicide. I mean, what else can we hope for? n

[See the Performance]

Bread & Puppet will be performing “Daughter Courage” at Consolidated Works, 500 Boren Ave. N., Seattle. Performances are Wed. March 8 to Sat. March 11, with 8 p.m. curtain for each show. Tickets: $15, advance; $18, at door; $9-$12 for ConWorks members. For more information contact 1(800)838-3006, or www.brownpapertickets.com.

Bread & Puppet is known for its simple, yet impressionistic puppetry. Pictured here are “The Goons.” Photo by Massimo Schuster.