WORT 89.9FM Madison
Bread & Puppet Theatre Come to Mazomanie Wisconsin
Wild Rumpus, a local circus training school, brought the bread and puppet circus to Maesomani this Saturday. The circus has been around for 55 years, but what is it exactly? Is it theater? Is it performance art? I headed to see the beginning after the end of humanity to find out. The one hour show, sponsored in part by WORT, covers a lot of ground. Here's a piece of the scene on the history of the revolution and repression in Haiti. The scene included a series of large black puppet figures representing the heroes of the Haitian revolution. Other scenes in the show covered the human toll of the war in Gaza. The scene focused on the true story of an autistic teenager who was mortally wounded in a bombing. The scene depicted puppets of wild dogs attacking the boy. Then there are the old standards of the Adjutprop theater about corporate greed in the revenge of the underclass where the puffed up billionaire in a top hat is made into a lunch by a trio of tigers. And there are scenes that subvert the circus form such as Trippies artists who never leave the ground but believe they are flying. Ten-foot dancing pink pencil people, a riotous brass band that daze a little offbeat and out of tune. And the mainstay of bread and puppet, massive paper mache heads that look like they just flew in from the Easter Island. True to its base in comedy Dale Arte, most of the performers wear masks and there's not much if any dialogue. But true to its base is about pulling the mask off the powers that be as the title of this show state and bringing us to the end of humanity. The founder and director of Bread and Puppet Peter Schumann describes what the show is about. "Tigers teaching the Congress of Cowards how to jump over billionaires and acquire the courage to not pay for the atrocities of the latest genocide. The proverbial sheep of the system refusing to be sheep and committing revolution against the system. And the blue horses of the peace and harmony, terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom, breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population." Wow. As any good circus, there are plenty of stilt walkers. Here's the impression of one member of the audience, my grandson Charlie who's nine and a half years old. "Yeah, and I love how the instruments just made it seem like it was part of the show, but it made it sound more realistic." Like a silent movie, the narration of the action on the stage is created by the music, sometimes triumphant, silly or sad, rather than by words. Here's Charlie's take on it. "I really enjoyed the music there. It just made me imagine what it would be like if I was in that show. It made me feel like it would be really easy being the show, but I know that it would take days, maybe, and by days, I mean like years to perform that." After the show, the immense mass and props were packed in their yellow screwbuses before the rain started. The bread and puppet circus will roll on for another month through fifteen more stops in the Midwest and the East Coast cities until they get back to their base in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. For WORT, this is David Arons. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Bread & Puppet Theatre Come to Mazomanie Wisconsin by WORT 89.9FM Madison