Peter Schumann at 90: “I’m a Papier-Mâché Revolutionary!”
The legendary founder of Bread and Puppet Theater is 90 years old and rising. In December I went to interview Peter Schumann in his home in Glover Vermont, together with his carpenter and comrade Henry Harris. We asked him about the wars of our times, about education, about ideology, and about the past and future of Bread and Puppet. Then in January, we decided to go back, and ask the same questions again. We talked for hours – trying to keep up with Peter who, in conversation just as in cirque, dances gracefully on visionary stilts through centuries and subjects. I made a transcript of all this, which billowed out like one of his painted bedsheets, with voluminous vistas of joy and woe… but it was easy to get lost in all the wrinkles and ruffles. So, I chopped it up, and slowly pieced it together again. This is an edited composite of both interviews, cut and pasted and kneaded and baked… hopefully the result will be, at least a little bit, like the world-famous bread and puppets. Heinrich von Kleist wrote that “where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet.” And so if what follows is more like a puppet of Peter than the man himself, so much the better. Without further ado, the papier-mâché revolutionary.
What’s happening in Gaza and what does it mean for this whole civilization?
That’s it – it’s finished, this civilization. It’s a pretend civilization that prides itself on a humanity that it doesn’t have. It has the opposite: it has inhumanity – thoroughly. Very thorough inhumanity – and nothing left over other than in little bits and pieces in individuals and in little clubs, that’s it… I mean how can they survive? … The last circus this last summer we called The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus. And that’s pretty much what it is. This is no more humanity. This pretense of a humanity with certain moral codes and etiquette of how to behave… that’s violated day in and day out. Right at the announcement of their peace deal they killed at least 100 people – in a school, just a hundred people, you know, mostly women and children, so what, just another hundred. And there’s no protest against that, are you kidding me? The bourgeoisie doesn’t see what it does? Phew. This is the bourgeoisie… And we are dealing with the kids of the bourgeoisie, you know. They come in flocks to us, because they want to learn otherwise. And when the puppeteers travel with their shows, people come even when academia cancels them – cancels their contracts for a few thousand bucks, on the eve of the performance… and there is immediate community support for another place. On tour, during the tour, on the same day, they can find another place. People are hungry for it. People know this is all shit…
There’s a mass media… we call them the truth industry. Yeah, what’s the truth industry? Upside down truths, half truths, quarter truths, all the versions of the truth that are not applicable to the truth. Unbelievable…. I’m trying to find news… Right now the big jargon of the various people who observe it, say OK, so the Axis of Resistance is now kaput, it’s finished, because of what happened in Syria. And others contradict that and say no, take the real latest news: Hamas is fighting as heavy as ever, and the same thing is true with Hezbollah. They are very successfully actually defeating the Israeli army in all kinds of details… the Israelis make no publications of their casualties; they are enormous, and they lose a lot of people and a lot of very valuable billion dollar equipment that the Americans gave them…
[Did you see the] Palestinian journalist [Sam Husseini] in a press conference with this Blinken guy? … As he was talking, the cops came and manhandled him, and he said ‘no it hurts’ – and he’s an older man in his 70s – and they manhandled him and took him out… and the rest of these hundreds of journalists they all sat there! They didn’t jump up and fight the cops? What kind of journalism is that? Why didn’t they jump up? All of them, staying seated?! Their own colleague, simply for asking a question, gets carried out of the room brutally… unbelievable! And the rest of them take that as if it’s part of the game. Yeah it’s a good job probably. Good little New York Times or Washington Post jobs, and they can’t risk them, no… These bastards. Bunch of fascists. That’s all they are. The press in America is disgusting. Just as academia is totally disgusting. What do they do? I mean, imagine: they call it education and they call the cops to beat up their own kids. Isn’t that the end of the definition of your academia, if you call in the cops to beat people up? By definition that should be the end … that’s not academia… that’s not research of the mind or investigation of the mind… it’s unbelievable, this farce of democracy, this total farce … And all of the world looks on and sees it… they can’t help but being dependent on this empire here, economically or otherwise, but the empire is also going downhill very fast, just like Israel… people are leaving them, running away from them… you see the Hasidim in Washington Square, and they all support Palestine, they don’t agree with the state of Israel. They say ‘that’s a wrong state, that’s not in our religion at all.’ They are the courageous people. The others are all cowards, idiots, stupid, uneducated…
I mean, imagine, that these fighters for freedom of press, they are immediately made criminals, and this is called the free press… it’s the opposite of what they pretend, all the time. It’s unbelievably false, what they say. They lie from morning to night. For what? For profit, for securities, for good salaries at the New York Times or Washington Post or whatever, or the stupid NPR shit…
I mean when Hamas broke out to do these hostage takings, you know, the big thing they make about that as if it was a war, did they ever look into how many Nazis were killed in the Warsaw uprising? Did they ever research that? It’s the same thing… But the biggest part was done by Israelis anyway; it’s pretty well researched. They had already, what’s it called, the Hannibal Directive – it was already in place at that time, and they decided no, no more deals, just kill our own citizens, why not, that’s better. Just as it is with the exchange of these hostages, again and again, there were so many chances to do it and they didn’t do it… Whatever they say turns out to be just lies. Convenient for making a speech in the New York Times or some bullshit like that…
I mean they gave Netanyahu standing ovations, for the mass murder of the day – the biggest mass murder in a long time, unbelievable…. so in other words, they steal the people’s money, hard earned money, usually, and give it to the mass murderer, and then he gets cheered for that? Are they so stupid, didn’t they go to school? I mean there’s an amendment to the constitution, the Leahy amendments, which forbid them to transport things without investigation of what it’s used for and how it’s misused… and they totally disregard what they themselves swear for. When they take their seat in congress they have to first swear with a hand on the bible to the constitution. Bullshit. They are totally liars. And cowards, cowards to the bone!
… All these Americans including Obama, they’re all war mongers – by education. They were all brought up to be war mongers, and that’s the only venue they have. The weapons manufacturers are so happy that it is like that; it’s the biggest production in America, it’s way bigger than any Coca Cola or anything… You can’t be an innocent bystander, there’s no such thing. This is our fate, to be artificially made into innocent bystanders, which we are not. We are guilty bystanders. The inability, the impotence of not knowing what is available to us, the great liberties that we have… The languages that are available to you are tremendous – they are huge, they are available; some of them are not available and have to be invented, or translated from older languages, all of that, but they are. But this is our lifetime, what do you do with our lifetime? That’s what we have to do! We have to do! No other way.
But you don’t support the war in Ukraine?
(Uproarious laughter) They don’t even take a look, they don’t even remember how Biden smiled on the TV screen when he said, oh I’ll take care of that gas line that goes from Russia to Germany… And he killed it, bombed it, and he told it to the American public with a smile; he said yeah we’re going to take care of that, and that’s what they did. And then they even gave aggressive weaponry to penetrate Russia, inside Russia. Are you kidding me? Russia is huge, fantastic, even way bigger than America. Siberia is bigger than America. Russia has no comparison to America. It’s a way bigger thing, and economically probably better off than America I would think. After they told them not an inch further with NATO: that was during the time when there was still the Warsaw Pact, when the Communists had their own thing, and Gorbachev canceled it, he said, no we will stop, in return for not an inch further of NATO, we will stop the Warsaw pact… Classic American trick… trick people into believing them… It’s not real, the reporting on it…. what the old Ukraine was, how the Nazis divided it, how it survived the empire afterwards… the American empire, and the Russian empire, and how it lived through this and still was the main agricultural background for wheat, and super precious goodies… It’s unbelievable, the stupidity of the reporting of what’s happening there…. it’s pretty horrendously the opposite of what is being told to the population.
The most common reasonable assumption from this moment is that we are going to die in nuclear holocaust. This is the logical conclusion of this type of warfare, because… Americans have a concept of ‘winnable nuclear war’… this is so typical for capital, there’s no conscience in it, no heart in it, no mind in it, it’s all just calculation, and the shameless, ridiculousness of this moneymaking… how many more objects does it take to make a person happy, it doesn’t make any sense, it’s ridiculous… All colonies live that way, whether it was Spanish or French or German, all these bastards establish these little aristocracies of superiority, little clubs of people… the beneficiaries of this, the exceptional ones… who wants to be part of that club. Disgusting.
Another theme in almost all the Bread and Puppet shows is migration. Alongside world war, mass deportation is in the news again. How can we understand migration and deportation?
After all, these wars necessitate migrations. Whatever you do there in those South American countries, with drug wars and other horrible inflictions on them, necessitates migration. There’s no other way; you can’t live. And to pretend otherwise, it’s ridiculous, for this continent of America which consists almost entirely of migrants, in the first second or third generation… How is that understandable, that a nation of migrants is against migrants?! What a ridiculous thing to do! Doesn’t make any sense. And these borders, as if they’re all evil over there – they eat dogs or cats, naturally, that’s what they do…
I’m Silesian. We were bombed out at the end of the war, just a few minutes later when the war was finished, the big bosses signed papers, they made Silesia into Poland and Czech Republic and phew, it was gone, so 95% of Silesians were deported…
Academia is in free-fall. What’s the beginning after the end of education? How should we work with young people? Can you recommend some good books?
There are so many good guidelines. Me, I’m at an advantage because we grew up as kids learning poetry by heart. So we are full of incredibly wonderful things that are just coming by themselves. We don’t have to research it, it’s in our vocabulary, you know. And these kids never learn poetry by heart. Their schools abandoned that habit a long time ago, and they don’t have that vocabulary. They have a shallow vocabulary educated by mediocre terms that are fashionable… it’s ridiculous to me… What happens to them when they are deprived of their computers and how much time they spend with this stupid information business all over the place instead of weeding the garden and planting the potatoes?
… And they go to schools… what used to be called radical schooling, and they come running here totally disappointed… it’s all over the place, we used to have sort of the semblance of opposition… That’s how it was in postwar Germany, all these radical schools – Rilke ran a school. There were beautiful radical schools; schools where kids had to learn carpentry in addition to academia – languages and skills, plumbing and poetry – the real stuff. Great ideas. My father, he was deep into that… The best advice we can give to kids who come here is to make as little money as possible. Try to live with as little money as possible. Don’t waste for that shit, it’s only good for beer-buying otherwise. Even beer you can make yourself. Don’t bother about that shit thing with money… I’m a proletarian and I realize that…. We work with the bourgeoisie; with their kids. In the kids’ education, art is a privileged enterprise of entertainment, of surplus, it has nothing to do with life, it’s bullshit. And we are teaching them no, it’s not bullshit, it’s the real thing. It’s the address, it’s the language. And that’s what you do when you do art, you do the language. What is your language going to be, how are you going to address the masses, how do you get it out? … Instead of shopping for beautiful paints and all that, no, you pick them up from the garbage, you take old sheets and cardboards and cut them out, and make big figures of them – it’s all available in the garbage of this civilization, this civilization is so rich in that…
…Use real good books. For example Kropotkin… So amazing, the biggest anarchist sensation in European literature, and Americans don’t even know about Kropotkin.… you know, the prince who at a teenage age told his parents ‘no more prince for me, I’m just Pyotr’… and then they sent him to a military academy and he traveled thousands of miles through Siberia, and he collected information that was the opposite of what Darwin said, which capitalism uses as its philosophy of competition. And Kropotkin found… in meadows, in birds, in deer, in coyotes – it’s the total opposite of that. It was the exact example of the opposite of the competitive philosophy that used to be the inspiration for capitalist enterprises, and he points it out so clearly. It’s called Mutual Aid… It’s a huge book, fantastic, American students don’t even read it in the university, it’s ridiculous, how can they avoid it? And so he’s put down in the category of an “anarchist,” an anarchist philosopher, and he is, yeah. Another [by him] is The Conquest of Bread – a few very good readable books, excellent examples… and there’s another companion book written by a German forester, The Hidden Life of Trees … fantastic, pointing out the secret languages of a much huger life … what’s underneath the tree – every form of life from mushrooms to insects – it’s unbelievably bigger… and how communication travels in there, how diseases get fought, how trees talk to each other in families, how they communicate between the fungi and the leaves; unbelievable, so beautiful. But it’s huge…. Same with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope: people don’t even know about it… he started writing it during Nazi Germany and then continued it after he went back to Europe, an American emigre like all the others… Instead of going to Frankfurt – Adorno and Horkheimer and all the people went there – and Bloch no. Bloch and Brecht went to East Germany, to the communists. Yeah. Very big difference… you know, corrupt system, difficult communism and all that, you know. But so what, way better than capitalism. Rents are cheap, health care is cheap, school is free. You know, a totally different system. People in America don’t even know that. In China people don’t pay for school. Why, what? How come Americans don’t even get informed on that? … Or Cuba… they could learn it from anybody. And they think of that as not relevant? Are you kidding me? Relevant to people’s life? How you make your money; naturally it’s the most relevant thing – how much rent, how much food costs… Americans grow up so incredibly stupid, uninformed on the world, uninformed… people have no idea how much bigger the world is. How there is more puppetry in Siberia than the whole of the United States. There is more versatility and ancient information from old theater forms… in old communication forms of theater. Definitely in Tehran; unbelievable, the richness of Iranian society, it’s so rich, so huge, much bigger than Europe… and when Khomeini was elected he threw out the Hollywood movies and all of a sudden puppetry was a major faculty in the Tehran university… I went to India, to Kerala, to one of the communist states of south India. Same thing; what they have to offer in way of ancient cultures, it’s vastly bigger than what Europe has, and definitely America. It’s so much bigger, in quantity and variety. And people here when they talk about Iran, they say oh but women get stoned for adultery. Really? Take a look at America. Who has the biggest prison system? Who tortures people with solitary confinement? And then to point fingers…
What’s your ideology? One time after a pageant, you stood next to a door frame in the middle of the pasture, and everybody walked through it, and you said “Now you’re a socialist!” But do you have to subscribe to the little red book?
No you don’t have to. Naturally I’m a communist, why wouldn’t I be… The overriding, call it the ideology of the day – it’s not the necessary outcome of this kind of thinking. Still you understand the ultimate simplistic difference of free education and healthcare, that’s a huge difference… What’s art good for? What do you do with a bunch of youngsters who don’t know what to do with themselves? What do you do with a beautiful landscape that’s not utilized agriculturally, but you could use for walking and revolutionizing and learning how to march together? …These are the realities; these little details of it, way more than the overriding ideology title, whether communism or socialism – it’s secondary to the reality of it. The reality of it is this big thing – they call it life I think. It’s a big thing: itches and twitches and grandma dying and auntie dilapidating and kid growing up – all of them together, same time. Yeah, my god, look at family life, look at what happens around here… it’s all over us, all around us…
Possibilitarians are proletarians… they are the masses, they are the 99 percent and they are available to everybody. We call them possibilitarians, because that’s it – but the possibilities are not opened up. Possibilities are just asleep, you know, and both Bloch and Kropotkin talk about that: the asleep-ness, the Not-Yet of things. The Not-Yet is so much bigger than the thing that’s here! And that’s the real expectancy of life… the Not-Yet in the sense of our living is the most important part of what Bloch calls Hope: it’s this vague thing that doesn’t have to be as vague as all that. It can be analyzed, it can be gotten, especially if you think of the difference of the 99 percent life and the 1 percent life and the controversy and the little politically pre-arranged battle between them… What could be clearer at this moment in American history, with three billionaires sitting right next to this new president – isn’t that as clear as it can be for the rest of the world? … Other people realize it in the rest of the world; this is a declining empire, it won’t be as Trump thinks at all. It’s an empire in decline…
…The Not-Yet is in the landscape also. You walk into our pine forest which is full of memorials, and people’s ashes, all of that, even grave sites, and what’s coming out of it… for example, the fact that people do have the hunger for memorializations, that people want that in their life. They don’t realize it, it doesn’t exist in this culture. When you go to Asian cultures it’s all over the place – meaningful memorializations – and here it doesn’t exist. And when you do it and the youngsters come and they sit there and talk about their aunts and their suiciding brother and all this stuff, it’s amazing what comes out. It’s a whole life in itself, just as part of realizing that life is so much bigger than the cliches about what life is… every week we do it. Once a week we go there and people let loose and do their talks. Part of life! Joel [Kovel] is in there, with his big book…..
Bread and Puppet Theater has been called political art, medieval art and religious art. You have been compared to Brecht, Genet, O’Neill… but what gets left out of all the analysis? Break it down for us; what are puppets? What is bread? What’s happening on this land? Who are you?
You think a puppet is a thing, a factual thing, a thing that you pick up and you can learn how to manipulate it, or somewhat. It’s not. It’s an opposite to your body and it emphasizes elements in your body that you didn’t even realize were there; that can do things that the body can’t do. For example a puppet has a little neck – no dancer can ever do what that neck can do; that neck can go all the way back, can go over here, there; can pick up the rest of the body and drape it around itself… It’s a divinity, it’s something that isn’t even comprehensible to people… no learning of effectiveness and what you want to say; that would be commandeering it — no way. It’s so secretly something, a whole thing, you can’t even imagine it. Only people who work with it – they realize it, slowly… and they start kneeling down in front of them before picking them up, carefully. Yeah…
The normal American diet is not only wonder bread but noodles, which go straight through the body to the shithouse…. Chewing is severe and real. And it massages your brain. So whoever eats pumpernickel becomes a revolutionary and whoever eats noodles becomes a capitalist. It’s a real thing, the simple recognition that food is something that you have to gain. Not just by tooth and saliva mixing, but also how you gather it, how do you get it… gleaning… a lot of tedium of all these little things coming together and nourishing families… When Elka’s parents bought his farm do you know why they bought it? Elkas’ mom was a peasant woman – poor family with nine kids – they took it because of this hillside here which is the watershed. This is the best water you can get anywhere in a landscape, to be so close to a watershed… it’s incredibly good, I keep telling the kids who come here, please drink the water, you won’t get it anywhere… And if you continue the stupid noodle eating, ok you’ll stay stupid, and if you chew pumpernickel you’ll be intelligent.
…Naturally in order to get land you have to team up with other people and make communities. Even Bread and Puppet, it couldn’t have worked with just a family; it needs more people, kids, gardens… there isn’t any other way of doing it. And then you have inherited an anarchy that is in total chaos, very hard to live with, but it’s worth it, because it produces something that the system can’t produce… outside the ambitions… nothing to do with the entertainment issues, and the desire to tickle people’s beautiful muscles for desire… that’s it, and the confusion makes it very attractive… It just does itself, and it will do it in conjunction with the latest news and horrors, and also the imbecility of not being told about it; having to live with the realization that it’s not in people’s conversation…
…Well I’m a papier-mâché revolutionary. I build giant papier-mâché swords to defeat the empires. Or divinities that are way more superior than capitalism; therefore come down on them when they don’t expect it and crush them with papier-mâché! Hahaha.
There are a lot of books and movies about Bread and Puppet. And there’s a big archive next door… but give it to us straight; how did this get started and what’s it all about?
Well, when you go into, you know, the details… it’s starting in the early years when we did Vietnam in the street… And we did things that we needed hundreds of people for, in the street: bombardments of prisoners, resurrections, pulling them up, cops, all that, death masques, all that – it was totally easy to get the couple hundred people that we needed to do it… People were sick and tired of the slogans… they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to be a shark in an airplane, they wanted to be a Vietnamese woman being bombarded – it was easy to get people to realize that, the big spectacle of it. It was a carnival you know. Like throwing shit at the cardinal. And you can do that during the carnival: a limited revolution, a very time-limited revolution, which is not quite a revolution because of its limitation, just a jubilee for the sake of relief. That’s what carnival was… it was time-limited and then it went back to normal… Wonderfully liberating for populations, but not meaningful until you take a look at what happened in the 14th century, which is when peasant revolutions – Engels wrote about them – became serious. And peasants – rye bread eating peasants – crowded together, and beat the shit out of the latest state of the art weaponry: knights on their horsebacks. And the peasants came… people with hayforks – ripping the brightest beautiful knights with their fancy attack methods of killing – they ripped them off their horses and beat the shit out of them. You know, there are big records of this. It happened again and again, starting in the 14th, century, into the 15th century, and into the 16th century… peasant revolution would have been the likely thing if Luther and Zwingli and the other reformers would have coordinated their moves with the peasantry. And they didn’t. They sided with the aristocracy… Thomas Müntzer, one of the biggest successes of peasant revolution – way more successful than Luther as a speaker – he was the big thing, not Luther. And then Luther has him hanged, publicly tortured to death, by the aristocracy… the 14th and 15th century would have been the ideal time to create real political revolutions. It didn’t happen. It totally could have happened… the bourgeoisie took over, and from the beginning, they imitated the aristocracy… and that became the goal, to become as nice as the aristocracy…
It has a hell of a lot to do with history…. [For example] what happened with Matthias Grünewald. He was Germany’s major late-medieval, early-renaissance northern artist… he was on horseback in 1502 going over the Alps… and during that travel was the 1502 total solar eclipse, which was the most serious thing… this one was really like the end of the world. Everybody thought this was the apocalypse; this was it, in the middle of the day – and he experienced that riding on horseback through the Alps… and whatever he painted after that is obviously influenced by the blackness. No question about it, everything comes out of the deepest possible darkness, even the most polychrome events that he invented like nobody else, come out of a darkness that is so severe; all his things, his crucifix and nativity and all of it. And that happened at a time when one of the major diseases in the middle ages was ergot, caused by rye, a fungus in rye. Rye was the food of the peasants, it’s much easier to grow than wheat; it grows in the Alps, in the deserts, even in Mongolia it grows fine. When I bought rye I went to the highway department in New York because they keep rye – it’s the toughest of grasses – when they need to fix highway entrances they grow rye… and that’s what the peasants ate, and the effect of ergot is craziness, total craziness, and skin diseases and so on; weird, serious stuff. So there was a whole sect of healers called the St. Anthonites, who dealt with the ergot effect, mostly in the peasantry. And they hired Grünewald to paint… and then people flocked to it, like to a healing altar. And people threw their crutches – they have records of all that, unbelievable! And that was the reality of painting. He painted all the healing arts available to him, underneath crucifixes, and painted all the most graphic horror of ergot… no comparison to any other picture in the renaissance… nothing compares to Grünewald… The peasant struggles are so important. The situation will come up again. For example with migrants being deported. This will happen again. People have to realize – what we eat is food. Food has to be made by people. Saying it comes out of tin cans is not good enough. So there could be a shift of attention when people realize what a serious thing food is. It’s huge…
In 1968 you lit a fire in hearts and minds; first it burned in New York City, then it moved to Vermont… and at some point you’re going to graduate; shuffle off the mortal coil; join the extraterrestrials… and we’re going to be left here running around wondering what to do. Any advice for the future of Bread and Puppet, post-Peter Schumann?
Oh yeah, totally ready for it… Death is little, death is big, or death, don’t believe it. Haha…. You’re right, it’s a good point, because puppeteers talk all the time about my funeral, and what kind of whiskey we’ll have served, and I agree a lot of good whiskey is needed for that funeral. But it’s so apparent what has to happen. The organization of Bread and Puppet is so changing according to etiquette, according to bourgeois habits, according to the latest result of the job market, which you know is so unfair to people’s talents… people are forced into these straitjackets of being slaves, just as Marx called them, slaves to the system… of – what? What is it? It’s slavery, whatever you call it – a form of slavery that you have to pay rent and all this. It’s ridiculous! Why? Totally unnecessary, stupid! Why? The 99 percent, let’s take a little close up look at what they are. OK, Bernie [Sanders] tried to do a little bit of awareness for the working class and so on. Not enough. Needs more. Yeah, mama mia…. our bourgeois little company needs it all the time, they need to be re-radicalized all the time.
Ernst Bloch says that “the true Genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.” What comes after the end of humanity? What do we do next?
My best examples come from Gaza and Lebanon, where people from under the rubble are declaring that: ‘no we are not giving up.’ No, my family is dead, my grandpa died, my cousins are no more – we are not giving up. They built a horse from trash, from ambulances destroyed by Israel; a German sculptor with teenagers built a big horse, a big statue, and then the Israelis destroyed it, immediately, and the message was yeah, out of this crap, we’re going to make a horse, galloping. It’s amazing what’s happening there…
…We will never totally explore a summary of what we need to do, but we should keep doing it. And you know that, I mean you have to do it, it’s never a solo enterprise, anyway. It won’t be done by a solo singer… it can only be done where not even conversation happens, something less than that… it’s trying something, doing something, pronouncing something – into the public, unexpectedly, you know – and see what happens to it, what’s the response to it, how do you get it? Yeah!
Immediacy. Do it immediately. To not do planning revolutions, to not do lengthy developments of a new type of engineering of this and that. But to step right into the street, step right into whatever is available, to speak right out in front of whatever you have out here… whatever size the group is doesn’t matter. You know the tour just went all across the country… the universities canceled them, quite a few of them, where they had contracts, and on the same night they found a community center, on the same night… In other worlds there’s a real hunger in this truth-deprived nation for other versions of truth, for looking at what the real thing is…
(December 16, 2024) Any thoughts you want to share with us before Christmas?
Santa and Walmart and whatever. Santa… at least in southern French culture, is a witch! Santa is a child molester and is a demon – nothing to do with goody goody. The house that he hits is seriously hit; he’s equipped with torturing equipment, and he is sincere. And so that fake little man is the sugary version of reality, which is a very bitter horror thing in culture. How was it transformed, it would be interesting to find out, how did they manage to turn it so upside-down? …The excuses for the great god of love religion don’t exist anymore. Because now people can read this world enough to realize that the god of love was a gigantic murderer, of genocidal proportions, all over the place … they discovered all the kids’ grave sites in Catholic schools here in America, remember that, shit like that? Yeah, is that the god of love or not? Yeah, it is.
(January 21, 2025) Do you have any New Years’ resolutions?
Good idea. I had a dream last night, about revitalizing the Domestic Resurrection Circus, and meeting crowds and crowds of people like we used to have, in the thousands, and walking with them… and as we walked, we called it, Revolution… Just walking around these circus fields, in my dream… doesn’t matter where do we go right? … I mean you have a job to do, with your teammates, it’s obvious, whether the town gives you permits or not is secondary. It will happen – you will get whatever you need, and otherwise you find other ways of doing it. But this is the important thing: you get those kids going.
This interview was conducted with Henry Harris.
Recommended
Bread and Puppet Theater: https://breadandpuppet.org
Ah! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet Theater … directed by DeeDee Halleck and Tamar Schumann, 2001
An Existing Better World: Notes on the Bread and Puppet Theater … by George Dennison, Autonomedia, 2000
Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread and Puppet Theater … by Marc Estrin, Ronald Simon, and Grace Paley, Chelsea Green, 2004
“On the Marionette Theatre” by Heinrich von Kleist, 1810:
The Lost Traveller’s Dream, by Joel Kovel, Autonomedia, 2017
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