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 In 1968, Bread and Puppet presented Fire, an understated yet hard hitting indoor piece about the Vietnam war, to critical acclaim at the Nancy Theater festival in France. This launched the theater into international prominence and helped secure over a decade of seasonal touring in Europe and beyond. During this period, Bread & Puppet was often associated with the New American Theater— a loose-knit avant-garde movement that included companies as diverse as the Living Theater, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, Robert Wilson and others. Schumann had come to the States informed in part by the European avant-garde, and in New York was exposed to the Dada influenced work of Cage and Cunningham; the early happenings of Oldenburg, Kaprow, Grooms, et al; Fluxus; and the Judson Dance theater. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Schumann's experimental sensibility was combined with much older forms and traditions: medieval passion plays, the bible, fairy tales and other folkloric traditions of story telling. Bread and Puppet was also set apart by its economic independence. Guided by a philosophy of living and working within the means available, the Bread and Puppet aesthetic was inextricable from the papermache, burlap, twine, and staples, that made up and literally held the puppets and the shows together. In 1970 Bread and Puppet moved to Vermont, first to a residency at Goddard College, then in 1975 to an old dairy farm in Glover, in the Northeast Kingdom. In Vermont, the annual Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was created, using the pastoral landscape to stage large scale outdoor productions. As the Theater faded from the contemporary theater spotlight, the two- day festival grew to become Bread and Puppet's central activity, produced by over one hundred volunteers and drawing audiences in the tens of thousands. Seasonal touring became even more diversified, and included more local, regional and third world venues; Bread and Puppet workshops—where shows and circuses were put together using local volunteers — became a more common mode of production and performance; and the Bread and Puppet Press grew to become a staple of the theater's income. Peter decided to end Circus in 1998, after the tragic death of an audience member in one of the teeming campgrounds that had evolved adjacent to the Theater. The Circus was succeeded by a summer program with weekly, smaller scaled performances. In this new format, the Theater continues its prolific output of new shows, addressing the issues of the day— like militarism, capitalism, and ecology— as well as re-staging classic Bread and Puppet shows from the 1960's and 1970's. Now on the eve of the Theater's 50`h anniversary, it is time to take stock of what has been accomplished, and what lies ahead. Over the years, Bread and Puppet has grown into a vast