ABSTRACT
BREAD AND PUPPET WAS 0NE of the seminal 60s counterculture theaters that continues to survive because of a tight, hard focus on its work. Though Bell focuses here on the company's use of a traditional genre, the parade. Bread and Puppet has also taken to the streets of many continents in an impulse akin to agit-prop. Since the early 70s, the theater's annual Domestic Resurrection Circuses on its Vermont farm have presented both Utopian and practical visions. Bread and Puppet witnesses and responds to events both here and abroad, attempting to integrate performance into the fabric of everyday life. Bell has both participated in and documented the company for over twenty years.
I decided to take my painting and sculpture into the street and make a social event out of it, and out of that grew my puppet theater.
Peter Schumann