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The Rye Puppeteers : Stage: Protest and bread baking are the staff of life for Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater. The durable, ‘60s-era troupe opens here Friday.

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TIMES THEATER WRITER

In this pastoral corner of the Northeast Kingdom, it seems like ancient history to think of the Bread and Puppet Theater as a vital product of New York City. That was back in the ‘60s, when America was swirling in anti-war sentiment.

Most theaters of turmoil bit the dust when the Vietnam War and the flower children faded. Bread and Puppet moved north. And with the depth of conviction of its founder, Peter Schumann, remained ideologically intact.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Aug. 30, 1990 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday August 30, 1990 Home Edition Calendar Part F Page 4 Column 2 Entertainment Desk 1 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction
Misspelled-- Photographer J. Robert Gibeau’s name was misspelled in the credits for the Bread and Puppet Theater pictures published in Wednesday’s Calendar.

In its new dwelling place--the old Dopp Farm on a winding, two-lane road lined with burdock and chokeberries a few miles south of here--Bread and Puppet redefined itself and endured.

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The 19th-Century farmhouse and its groaning barn, which is now the Bread and Puppet Museum, have become a backcountry tourist stop. The barn leaks when it rains. It is filled with what Schumann calls Cheap Art: the banners, masks, prints, posters and puppets that chronicle the company’s history--or “The Art of Impermanence.”

And yet the Bread and Puppet Theater (the name derives from the company’s ritual of passing out home-baked bread dipped in oil and garlic to its audiences, and from its use of puppets of all shapes and sizes) has been anything but impermanent. What’s amazing is that it is not a relic. It is ageless--paradoxically childlike and primitive in spirit, yet addressing itself, with a metaphysical edge, to complex contemporary issues.

Schumann (a musician, sculptor and painter as well as theater artist) attributes this style to his influences: folklore, medieval art, Dadaism and German Expressionism. The result is a company whose epic collective works combine a theater of protest with the pageantry of the Middle Ages.

Some of it comes our way for the first time this week, as part of the L.A. Festival. “Metropolitan Indian Report,” a piece about the plight of the American underclasses will be presented in UCLA’s Little Theatre Friday through Monday.

“Uprising of the Beast,” which has a 40-foot puppet, angels, animals, skeletons and evil dwarfs, will be staged in a hangar at Santa Monica Airport Sept. 14 and 15. As Schumann explains it, “It tries to dislodge the curious Judeo-Christian notion that the world was created to be dominated by human beings.”

The Teatro Mundi pageant will be part of Chinatown’s Moon Festival Sunday at Union Station and performed again in other venues.

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The company subsists mainly by doing what it will do here: touring and participating in parades.

The sight the old brightly decorated Bread and Puppet school buses lumbering down the road, like painted dinosaurs, is familiar in Vermont. But the company has traveled the nation and the world. And rather than shrink its performance style to make it more portable it relies, wherever it goes, on small armies of volunteers, many of them children.

The Bread and Puppet farm functions as a revolving door. Between four and eight people are with it full time, a bigger number come and go, and a still bigger number help out in the summer with the company’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus.

Schumann places responsibility for his bread baking on “the bad conscience of an artist.” He bakes daily, “Silesian sourdough rye,” he says, “ground freshly on a hand grinder. As good as good can be.” It’s been 29 years since he left Germany, but the accent lingers.

“A lot of our artmaking obviously doesn’t make sense,” he continued. “It serves a culture that, in itself, doesn’t make sense and doesn’t doesn’t need the services of art, because it has organized what it calls entertainment or relaxation exercises in a manipulative way. It’s made them part of the market system. The artist feels like the son of the village idiot. A bread baker can get away from all this.”

One of five children, Schumann was born in Silesia 56 years ago, learning to bake at his mother’s knee. As a young man, he traveled Europe studying design, music, sculpture and dance, hoping to find a way to combine them.

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In 1959, he married Elka Scott, an American student he met in Munich, and, after attending a concert by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, began to think that the United States might welcome his ideas. So in 1961, he moved his growing family to New York where, after struggling as a sculptor, he began working with masks and dance at the Judson Church. When Elka took a teaching post at a Vermont boarding school, Peter joined her and taught puppetry.

So it began. By 1963 the Schumanns and their five children were back in New York where Bread and Puppet evolved, becoming known as much for its unique anti-war pageants, voter-registration and rent-strike parades, as for Schumann’s custom of baking and breaking bread with the crowd.

Between 1970 and ‘74, Bread and Puppet made its way north, first as resident theater at Vermont’s Goddard College, then by settling into the old Dopp Farm. Elka’s parents had bought it a few years earlier and offered to rent--later donate--some buildings to the theater.

The end of the Vietnam conflict and the move out of the city were big changes for the company. “We had to learn to live in the countryside, to use it to make these landscape architecture puppetry pieces. We also find it not so interesting any more to go inside theaters,” Schumann said, lapsing into German sentence structure. “The expense of tickets is so forbidding. Also the atmosphere--the feeling that you play for a specialized clientele and not for everybody. We concluded it was better to go into a community and invite its members into our show.”

The free, two-day Domestic Resurrection Circus held in August is part of that wish “to make more all-encompassing theater and to do that by choosing big scenes that are meaningful for big, non-elite audiences, in the tradition of Asiatic or Greek cyclic theater.”

A touring version was started in 1969 and refined at Goddard. The nearby 30-acre field they perform in now includes a big clay oven Schumann built where he and a helper bake 1,500 loaves a day. It features up to 20 sideshows and involves some 200 people.

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Dressed in white shirt and trousers under a straw hat, shaping loaves on the bread-house counter, Schumann is a man engaged in a sacrament. The graying beard and mustache that cover much of his face, leave an unobstructed view of his transcendent blue eyes that seem to look inward, as if in a communion of thought and action. Yet his handshake, extended on another occasion, is pure steel.

Fifteen thousand to 20,000 people attend the circus each year. The relationship with the community has had its ups and downs, but neighbors make a bit of change by charging to park and camp. This buys the theater some good will. “This is conservative country. People mind our politics. Expressing our views publicly is not only not wanted, but makes for hostility. Sometimes we don’t get invited back,” Schumann said.

“Or they call and say in a concerned voice, that they don’t want any controversy,” added Michael Romanyshyn, a puppeteer who’s been with the company off and on since 1975.

“Vermont is a conservative state, but its Republican politics are independent,” said John Bell, a now-and-then member since ’73. “The focus is on doing whatever you want but respecting the right of your neighbors to do the same. That fits in with what we do.”

Schumann does not consider himself a sculptor who wandered into theater. “Even in high school I was more into mask-making,” he said. The puppets are created by what he calls “Stone Age methods.” The clay is local, mostly dug out with buckets from the riverbed and used and reused for the basic building. The paper for making puppets is donated by a friend and comes from an industrial garbage bin in New Jersey. So the bulk of the materials is cheap or free.

Is Bread and Puppet then a one-man band with a lot of unpaid help? Romanyshyn says no.

“That’s too one-dimensional. There’s something in it for people on every level that makes them want to do it. People who participate on the musical level. People who invent individual dances, text, dialogue. Peter directs the show, 180 people perform it.”

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He and Bell prefer to think of Schumann as a philosophical ringmaster whose work is very different from, say, that of Robert Wilson. Schumann’s is looser and less predetermined. Says Bell: “It needs somebody to invent a movement for a puppet or propose a piece of music or propose a text or a story. It’s always drawing you in. A lot of the rehearsal process is improvisation, but (the finished product) is not improvised at all.”

Adds Romanyshyn: “I think the end result is very precise.”

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