Bread & Puppet: The Essential Furthermore

Bread & Puppet presents: The Essential Furthermore

Sunday, November 10th

4:00pm

Emery Community Arts Center

-UMF Student Admission: Free (Reservations recommended: please reserve your free ticket by contacting Ann Bartges [ann.bartges@maine.edu])

-General Admission: $10-$25 (no one turned away for lack of funds)–Advance tickets available for purchase at Up Front and Pleasant Gourmet, 157 Front St., Farmington ME 04938

https://breadandpuppet.org

The Essential Furthermore draws on the German peasant rebellions of the 14 and 15 hundreds to address the need for insurrection against the status quo of planetary ecological collapse, and hostility to the refugees created by natural and human-made disasters. The show demonstrates the power of mass political and social movements with massive dances in Bread and Puppet’s pedestrian expressionist “Lubberland” style, building momentum as the piece grows into a polyvocal fugue on several crucial themes of the moment: totalitarianism, extinction, and “the normalization of the unthinkable.”

More about Bread & Puppet Theater:

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street. During the Vietnam War, Bread and puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people.

In 1974 Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad, and from sales of Bread and Puppet Press’ posters and publications. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers.

Today, Bread and Puppet continues to be one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.

---