Bread and Puppet tour at Race Brook Lodge
Date/Time
Location
Race Brook Lodge (864 Undermountain Road, Sheffield, MA 01257, Sheffield MA)
As many ask what they can do in the light of a new reality – Race Brook Lodge looks to Bread and Puppet Theatre for a new set of questions.
Help welcome this historic political-art practice collective to Race Brook Lodge as they tour New England and the Hudson Valley this November. This tour presents a double bill, directed by Peter Schumann, crafted for this exact moment: The Possibilitarian Imperative Everything Show, followed by Gray Lady Cantata #9.
The word “possibiltarian” is a Marc Estrin translation of Robert Musil’s term “möglichkeitsmensch” from his novel The Man Without Qualities, about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The term was invigorated by Margaret Thatcher’s remark on capitalism: “there is no alternative,” to which we respond: “there are a thousand alternatives!”
Of The Possibilitarian Imperative Everything Show, director Peter Schumann reminds us that, “at a time when Freedom and Democracy slaughter babies and moms by the dozen every day and don’t even seem to have any understanding of what they are doing to the world or to themselves, we Possibilitarians, operating on the Principle of Hope, put on our boots to kick aside impossibility and declare new possibility in response to this obviously despaired situation.”
Gray Lady Cantata #9 continues a series of shows made in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the Vietnam War. This new iteration includes texts from Palestinians living through the war in Gaza. With the iconic gray lady puppets from the original production moving through vignettes both dreamlike and brutal, Gray Lady Cantata #9 offers meditations on grief, war and resistance.
As always, the shows will include puppets large and small, music, up-to-the-minute politics, and spectacles not to be missed. After the show Bread & Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread & Puppet’s “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press – will be for sale.