Peter Schumann talking:
My first gig here in the United States was a participation in War Resister League and Living Theatre producing a General Strike for Peace. That’s a big word for something that involved maybe 60, 80 or 100 people.
born in Germany, 1934. Born in the Shatterer period. I was born in Silesia, in the outskirts, in a small town, Lubin. When the war ended, or came close to an end, we were bombarded by the Allies, and we heard the Russian tanks approaching, and everybody fled. And my family fled to the Baltic Sea, where they had some friends. It was called Schleswig-Holstein. And so, we lived as refugees for a few years on the farm, five kids. There we lived, having to make a new life, gleaning the fields, grinding the rye and wheat berries, making sourdough, making bread, in an old-fashioned village where they still had a communal bakery. So, everybody brought their loaves in one day a week to the big oven, and the baker baked them.
My father was a teacher, literature teacher at the high school. My mom was busy with five kids. Whispering was the manner of speech. When adults came to my parents’ house, the kids were asked to leave. So, we were locked out of these conversations about Hitler.
I had two kids. She was a student in Munich on some scholarship. And we learned to know each other, and we came to visit. Then something happened, some glue in the seats or something, so we got stuck in New York City.
she is the granddaughter of Scott Nearing. Helen Nearing. he was an incredible influence on all of us. He was a radical that radically didn’t just rethink this system of society, but also invented a way of living apart from the normal dependencies. So, he moved to Vermont, started farming, started gardening, and inspired a lot of other people to do so. A whole movement of self-sustenance homestead making started through his activities. as they called him, an advocate of simple living. he was there in Vermont, but I came to New York City.
Bread and Puppet. Name. because I was baking anyway. I had the habit of baking. I helped my mother baking. My mother always baked bread. We never knew that other bread was edible. That dark bread is very different from light breads because it’s sustenance. It’s a bread you can live off. And my starter is 150 years old.
set up a brick oven to bake for the people who are coming to the performance. when we can, you know. Brick ovens that we build now on tour is one pallet of bricks. That’s 400 bricks. The secret is that you have to find real brick, meaning clay brick. And then we stack it. It’s called cantilevering. And you build a dome, and takes an hour to build an oven. No big—no big thing. No mortar, no nothing.
We just took a liking to that idea, that when people come to the theater, that we give them a piece of bread to eat. Why puppets? Umm, Mamma Mia, that’s hard to say. Me and my brother, and I think my sisters also, made always puppet shows when we were kids, when the—at any occasion, birthday party or whatever. There would be a bed sheet strung between two chairs, and then puppets would be taken out, and we would perform for each other. So, endless variants are possible to be performed.
puppets got bigger and bigger. that came from New York City, from being here and realizing, when you play out in the street, that the little stuff is too little. So want to be bigger, and bigger meant really bigger. So we kept growing them to larger sizes and, yeah, still growing.
The folks who come, I think, are people who are dissatisfied with distributing leaflets, carrying pre-painted posters and slogans, and are happy to have the opportunity to become an inside of a larger thing, of a sculpture that is multiheaded and gigantic and is rolling through the street and has its own language that persuades people visually, doesn’t need language but speaks by itself. So, we found it easy to find people, either directly at the demonstration—for example, the one that you mentioned—that you mentioned in Washington at the occasion of the Afghan invasion.
we took two or three hundred puppets to that demo. And we worked on the outskirts of the speeches that were being delivered at that time, and asked people to join us. We had about 15 friends who would choreograph a group of 30 or 40 people into particular movements with these puppets. And we walked around on the outskirt doing these practices. And when the march started, we headed together. We could pull all of that together and could do this big street dance.
Nothing seemed to have been learned from it. The interpretations of 9/11 were absurdly amiss, and typically the official news organs and so forth couldn’t find any way of explaining to people what happened there and what was bombarded there. It was always taken as an attack as if the civilians, who were the fallout and the horror in it, were the—had been the target. They were not the target. The target was the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And these were the collateral damage that America took so much care to explain to people that war produces—collateral damage. So there it is.
We had an offer from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, to be theater-in-residence. We always wanted to live in the countryside, and we said, “Hooray! Now we can go to the countryside.” We always—we wanted to, what Scott, what Elka’s grandpa did, you know, to go and grow potatoes. So here was a chance to grow potatoes and make puppet shows.
We called it Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, and we meant it to be all-embracing and huge and to be everything from carnival and circus to the lyrical concentration point of any abstract and intense style of thinking that you might do publicly. And it became—it developed its shape in that matter. So we started on Cate Farm at the Goddard campus in the same year we moved there, in ’70, and then continued when we moved to Glover four years later into a landscape that included a natural amphitheater, an old gravel pit, and allowed us to perform without electrical amplification. And it grew and grew, and we started to separate the different elements of the show more and more. So we called part of it sideshow, part of it circus and part of it pageant, ’til finally now we are going back to melting it all together into one show.
I think it was a self-defeating mass gathering. We ended up getting 40,000 and 45,000 people per spectacle. And just the logistical difficulty of all this was fantastic. And then, finally, there happened a piece of horror where a man, a drunken man, killed a drunken man. So, but anyway, it became for us the—the way out of making these massive spectacles, which weren’t only our spectacle anymore. They sort of became spectacles in their own right in imitating American mass meetings, with all the drug traffic and all the ado of bands who were hired for the campgrounds to entertain the people who didn’t even attend the circus itself. Too much ado. Good riddance.
stilting, I learned stilting from a monk, a former monk from France, who had worked in Languedoc, I think, is the area where they have shepherds who are professionally on stilts because the ground is wet and rocky, and the way of guarding sheep is easier done from stilts. And they have the funny habit of spinning wool on stilts. So they do not only stilt; they have a third stilt that has a little seat, so they also sit on their stilts, and they do spinning. and making—producing something on their stilts. So, anyway, that monk showed us how to build stilts. Then we all got hooked, and we tried.
from two-by-twos or from cedar poles, whatever we had. It was easy. they are more like 10-and-a-half feet from the foot down. sit on top of one of our school buses, and I put a box on that, because it isn’t quite tall enough. Yeah, a box on top of a school bus. You just lift yourself up, and the rest is balance. You wiggle from one foot to the other, like we will do when we walk. Same thing.
in the very beginning, we just loved the danciness that you can get from stilts. It’s just—it’s a fun technique of being up and above everything.
we need to make fun of Uncle Sam. I think it’s very important. That figure, he’s like Santa. Santa and Uncle Sam, we love those ridiculous figures, to nose them I think the public deserves them in this form.
in our theater, everybody does everything. And characters are usually gigantic groups of characters instead of singular characters. We have groups that we call Grey Ladies. We have groups that we call Uncle Fatsoes. The first Uncle Fatso I built with kids. And the kids called him Uncle Fatso, just a big landlord with a big top hat, big fat nose, no grin, and cigar hand one hand, and the other hand we made so that it could be detached and that the kids could run it and punch something with it. So it was an activated marionette hand that could go on its own, went away and did its job and then came back to Uncle Fatso.
During a lot of these Domestic Resurrection Pageants, we built some Evel Knievel gigantic thing that was meant for burning. So these were either apocalyptic horseback riders or giant pieces of imitation machinery, robots of sorts, that sometimes we attached, in public and with public help, a lot of words of what should be burned onto them and that then were set ablaze by Mother Earth, who comes in. She is a big puppet that takes about 60 to 80 people to operate. And she comes, and she has a torch in hand, and the torch gets lit. And then she gets approached to that monster thing that did all the killing before, and she burns it. And then people do dances around there and make—use it as a bonfire.
this particular fire is the opposite of the bread oven fire. I love my bread oven fire. I sit there. I smoke my cigar or not. And you be by yourself. I think in India there’s a proverb where they said humans will never tire of watching fire or elephants. And that’s what it is: can never tire of looking into flames.
we don’t have playwrights in the theater. Our playwright is the daily news, is this—all this horror that happens. And it’s not so much that we want to do it, but we continuously get obliged to do it, because the goddamn media don’t say it. They are—they live by omission, rather than by reporting. So these omissions—I mean, you are the glorious exception to this, so we listen to Democracy Now!, or we read the other radically unincorporated news media things that are still around. So, it’s—it’s not for the fun of it, really; it’s for—that service needs to be rendered to the public. If you’re an artist, you can’t slip into this situation of nonparticipation. you have to. I mean, it’s speech, what you build, whether it’s from papier-mâché or music. But what you build is an address, so the address has to make that sense that the public needs it.
When the first atomic bomb was exploded, Oppenheimer, the chief architect of that bomb and of that group of scientists, remembered a line from the Bhagavad Gita. And he happened to be a knowledgeable student of Sanksrit, so he knew the original. And that line goes like this: “Life, the splendor a thousand suns blazing all at once, resembling the exulted soul, is become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” So that sprang to his mind as the interpretation for what he had participated in building there. And I think it never went away from him. I think he suffered from remembering that line ’til the end of his days.
The exhibit, which is really inspired by Jonathan Berger’s insistence on me doing that, so he needs to get that credit there. And also the museum, the Queens Museum. I haven’t got any exhibits in America, basically. I don’t know. People don’t want that kind of art.
With political messages and with “Wah!” attacking and yelling at them. They want something more docile or more fashionable or whatever that is.
And the exhibit has different routes in it. One route is peasant revolution, 14th, 15th—15th, 16th century in Germany, very important revolutions that never became revolution because of the reformers, because of Luther and Zwingli and so forth, who sided with the aristocrats against the peasants. The uprisings were tremendous, and they—in the Black Forest, in the Upper Rhine Valley, in the Vosges in France, Alsace—the uprisings with thousands of men and women who—peasants who realized that with their pitchforks and hay rakes, they could rake these knights off their fancy horses and beat the pulp out of them and win the battles. And they did. They did win quite a few battles against those landowners, ’til the big reformers turned against them.
I make books all the time. At the Printed Matter thing, my son Max made that exhibit. He has, I think, 420 titles of books from those 50 years. It’s all along the—I think we started making little books, as we made little books on the news. We took something out of The New York Times usually and made it into a little book, and then we went out with a cardboard box around the neck to Astor Place, which is a big move-around place for people going from one subway to the other, and we sold them one for 25 cents, two for 10 cents, three for five cents.
I make books for my grandchildren every year. For my kids, too. life is comical. So, what—that’s what comes to mind, you know? You draw, and you make stories, and they become comics.
books. I really love that fact, that you can touch them, that you can turn them, that you write in the—in the Queens Museum right now, I went in. I was baking outside at my little brick oven. And I went in to check out—because it was a kids’ day, I went in to see how the kids would look at the exhibit. And they had closed off the library part. And I asked them, “Why?” And they said because one cover had come off of one of the books when the kids turned the pages. So I opened it, and we put a piece of tape on the thing. I mean, they are falling apart. That’s OK. You know, they are books that—they are not meant forever. They are meant for looking and leafing through, and there will be damage, yeah. That’s all right.
Internet may have poser. but I haven’t discovered it, because I don’t have it. I don’t desire it. I haven’t logged on at all.
free art store in Vermont we started doing cheap art—we called it “cheap art”—in the ’70s sometimes, and we just decided, “Let’s make little cookie-size paintings and take them in the streets, and park the bus. So we invented a lot of sloganeering outside the bus. And then, not just kids, but grown-ups came. And we sold stuff to—five cents, 10 cents, at affordable prices.
“The WHY CHEAP ART? manifesto.”
“PEOPLE have been THINKING too long that
ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS & the
RICH. ART IS NOT BUSINESS !
It does not belong to banks & fancy investors
ART IS FOOD . You cant EAT it BUT it FEEDS
you. ART has to be CHEAP & available to
EVERYBODY …
ART IS CHEAP !
HURRAH!”
I never did totally what I think I set out to do, the combining of the musics and the sculptures and the languages that are available when you do public address art. Very challenging. Right now in the church, in “The Shatterers” show, we change the show every day. It’s every day a new show. And that’s the nature of it. So—but to—we are not changing it because we feel it needs to be varied; we are changing because we are still looking how to do it. And that’s sort of the rest of puppetry. It’s a huge field of ancient bulk, ancient festivals that are in there. The whole carnival is in there. The whole idea of carnival is in there. The whole history of sculpture is in there. The whole history of crazy poetry is in there, of nonsense. And how to make that into a one thing is evasive. It’s difficult. Doesn’t happen.
the place of older people in society in the United States. they don’t have enough to do. Society doesn’t have any place for them. And I don’t get it. Why? I mean, when I see them, I think of my mother-in-law and other older women who I met in my life, especially women. That they were so unemployed, so unused by society, is beyond my comprehension. They are so powerful. They are so able to do things. And they—and society doesn’t find a way of bowing to that concentrated power and employing it. It doesn’t do it. It discards them. It leaves them out.
look in older society. There are many societies where older people have automatically a role as being older people with more experience. This doesn’t exist in this society. This is a society of youngsters and of pushy middle-aged characters, and the rest is not so welcome. The kids are not welcome, and the olds are not welcome.
retirement. I really don’t know what it means. Because why? Retire from what? From yourself, or from what?
young people are very definitely less educated. Very definitely, their knowledge—when I just think of the kids who come to us, coming from art schools, from colleges, from universities so often, but their knowledge of musics and literatures and arts in the world is minimal, is deploringly small. And a lot of them are with us and work with us because they find that there are open doors to various aspects of just that, of musics and of other languages than the one that’s educated, that’s supposed to be communication but is so much less.
We find the young people who come to us a very encouraging bunch—the desire to participate, the desire to work together, the whole desire for artists to get out of the art education as a solo education for some acrobatic job, but rather to do something together that matches with other peoples putting things together, and then, because of this producing it together, becomes more open and bigger, that this is deep and true in young people and that they are pursuing it just as the—what did they call it? The uprisers? The—you know, the people who did the The Occupy movement. It’s not gone. It’s just asleep. And that’s these people who listen to your news, to the non-existing news that are all over the place. And they have to do something with it. It’s not good enough to just analyze it or complain it, or what have you. It has to be transformed, has to be put in a grinding bag, ground up, made into something, and then produce with it. And they do that. Occupy continues to give hope.
— source democracynow.org
Peter Schumann, founder of the legendary Bread and Puppet Theater, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. His first solo museum exhibition, “The Shatterer,” is on display now at the Queens Museum in New York.