2016-106-E Arts - The ArtsCenter - Fall 2015 Arts Grant Agreement

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DocuSign Envelope ID: D830FDE7-7735-4C4D-946F-99B358D08638 Orange County Arts Commission Fall 2015 Arts Program Grant Cantastoria Workshop with Bread and Puppet Theater About Bread and Puppet Theater In the early 1960's, a group of scruffy troubadours rented out a small loft on Delancey Street in New York's Lower East side, and began putting on weekly performances. Headed by Peter Schumann, a sculptor, dancer and baker recently emigrated from Germany, they would distribute Schumann's bread to the audience who would slowly chew the coarse sourdough as the puppet performance ensued. Schumann was just back from a puppet teaching gig at the Putney School in Vermont, where his wife Elka had been teaching Russian language as a means to support her graduate studies in the same field. Unable to successfully pitch a class in choreography and dance, the school administration did accept Schumann's proposal to teach an extra-curricular class in puppetry. Named alternately the Moosach Puppet Theater and People Puppet Theater, Schumann also took the show on the road. He converted his father-in-law's small trailer into a mobile puppet stage, and hauling it with a beat up station wagon, started an improvised solo tour across New England, putting on impromptu performances in random towns and cities along the way. Back in New York City, friends Bob Nichols and Mabel Dennison underwrote the $60 a month rent on the Delancey Street space, and Schumann quickly converted it into a theater and puppet museum. Schumann's skills and interest in dance and sculpture were fused in puppetry, and the bread baking and distribution shored up the utilitarian function of an art practice synthesized with daily life. Peter and Elka decided on the name Bread and Puppet Theater. The name stuck. The year was 1963. The Bread and Puppet Theater would embark on a remarkable 50 year journey, leaving an indelible stamp on the world of theater and the American cultural landscape. From the humble loft on Delancey Street, the Theater took to the streets and beyond. Enmeshed in the radical counterculture of downtown New York, and informed by Elka's heritage of political activism, beginning in 1964 with some of the earliest demonstrations against U.S. Involvement in Southeast Asia, Bread & Puppet became a familiar presence in the protest movement against the Vietnam War over the following decade. The politics were also local — during the summers of'65 and '66, Bread & Puppet created large scale outdoor pageants in some of the poorest neighborhoods of New York City, and in collaboration with the residents addressed urban political and social issues of the day. It was here that some of B&P's most enduring puppet icons — Uncle Fatso, The Dragon, Mother Earth and Uranos —were created with the help of the neighborhood kids.