Bread + Puppet Theater Returns to Bennington
Greenwall Auditorium was full to busting when eight performers from Bread + Puppet Theater took the stage on the evening of Thursday, April 3. Students and community members filled the rows of chairs and the balconies along both sides and the back of the room. Students climbed steep ladders to catwalks high above the crowd and let their feet dangle.
The performers played music as the audience arrived.
"The best seats are on the floor," one of the performers shouted between the musical prelude and the performance, called Obligation to Live. "Don't be shy," they boomed. Many left their seats and streamed to the front.
This was not the first time the troupe had been to Bennington, said David Bond, Associate Director for the Center for the Advancement of Public Action, during opening remarks. Bond read from a press release produced for their first visit in 1967, just three years after the group was founded.
"The Bread + Puppet Theatre seems to be a distinguished exception to the rule that political protest makes for inferior art," Bond read. "In [founder Peter] Schumann's case the protest and the art are inseparable, perhaps because both flow from the deepest springs of human concept."
The group had visited at least twice more in the intervening years between its first Bennington appearance and this one, in 1989 and 2015.
Throughout the 1-hour performance, the audience sat rapt in lessons in the Bread + Puppet worldview, including harsh facts of those imprisoned around the world and the lack of access to food, water, electricity, and medicine among much of the world's population.
As harsh as the message, the delivery was light, including interesting visuals, physical humor, and pleasant harmonies.
Gratefully, after the empty-hearted and empty-minded figures on stage were peacefully vanquished, the sun shone.
As is customary at their shows, the group served bread and sold what they call "Cheap Art" after the performance.
"It was such a delight to welcome Bread + Puppet back to 51成人猎奇, and what a timely return it was," said Bond, afterwards. "Such dark days surround, but Bread + Puppet reminds us that gathering together in righteous outrage and defiant possibility brings a warmth that might just force the spring of revolution."