"Fifty Years Bread and Puppet: Cheap Art and Political Theater": a symposium with performances hosted by Boston College

The Boston College Theatre Department is proud to
announce a one-day symposium with performance in celebration of the fiftieth
anniversary year of the Bread and Puppet
Theater, the foremost populist, political theater in the United
States.  The event -- titled "Fifty
Years Bread and Puppet: Cheap Art and Political Theater" -- will
take place on BC's Chestnut Hill campus on Saturday, September 14, 2013.  In the morning and afternoon, there will be
scholarly presentations examining the aesthetics and politics of Bread and
Puppet and panel discussions looking at the company's legacy and
influence.  Archival film footage of
Bread and Puppet performances over the decades will be screened.  Bread and Puppet founder Peter Schumann will provide the keynote address in the form of one
of his famous "Fiddle Lectures." 
The celebration will culminate with an evening performance by Bread and
Puppet of The Fifty Years Cabaret followed by a public interview with Peter
Schumann.



"Fifty Years Bread and Puppet: Cheap
Art and Political Theater" is being organized by Scott T. Cummings, Chair of the Boston College Theatre Department,
and Dr. John Bell, eminent puppet
theatre scholar and Director of the Ballard Museum of Puppetry at the
University of Connecticut.  The symposium
serves as a continuation and capstone for the residency of John Bell as Boston
College's 2012-2013 J. Donald Monan, S.J. Professor of Theatre Arts.  During BC's "Year of the Puppet,"
Bell taught two courses in puppet and object theatre, curated an evening of
contemporary puppet and object theatre performance, and directed an original
shadow puppet play as part of "New Voices 2013," an evening of
original theatre by Boston College student artists.



“Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet
Theater has been one of the most unusual American theater companies of the 20th
century and now the 21st century,” Bell recently said. “It was the first contemporary theater in the United States to define
puppetry as an art form particularly capable of addressing the most pressing
issues of the day in deeply moving performances that could reach audiences of
all ages.  The occasion of the company’s
fiftieth anniversary is a good time to consider the nature of its extensive and
extraordinarily influential work in national and global contexts.”



The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded by Peter Schumann in 1963 on New
York City's Lower East Side as a political theater focused on the problems of
the neighborhood.  Over the years, it
developed a unique aesthetic and mode of production that uses puppets, masks,
sculpture, music, dance, and language to address troubling political and
economic conditions and to resist the monolithic power of imperialism and
capitalism.  In 1974, Bread and Puppet
moved to a farm in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, which has remained its
headquarters for four decades.  A two-day
festival of puppetry and pageantry titled "Our Domestic Resurrection
Circus" was presented annually in the summer until it was discontinued in
1998.  Bread and Puppet is one of the
oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatre companies in the country.  It continues to tour many months of the year
around the United States and abroad, including an outdoor performance of the
Total This & That Circus on Sunday, September 1st at 3pm on the Cambridge
Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts.



"We feel privileged to be able to gather a small portion of the Bread and
Puppet community here at Boston College to celebrate their achievement,"
says co-convener Scott T. Cummings, Chair of the BC Theatre Department.  "The sustained commitment needed over
the years to create thousands of puppets, thousands of performances, and
thousands of loaves of sourdough bread is an inspiration to anybody who
considers theatre as a public forum and a tool for social change. We want to
honor that, to examine it, and to introduce it to our students as one model for
making theatre that is joyful and engaged."



Events for the daytime symposium will include scholarly presentations by
theatre historians and researchers from Northwestern University, Reed College,
Harvard, Goddard College, Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and other
institutions.  A panel of independent
artists -- including visual artist Kiki
Smith, satirist and solo performance artist Paul Zaloom, media activist Dee
Dee Halleck, puppet artist Amy
Trompetter, actor George Bartenieff,
and playwright Erik Ehn -- will
discuss the effects that Bread and Puppet has had on their work.  Current and former members of the company
will share their perspectives on how they collaborate to create new work.  Archivist Adam Schutzman will screen seldom-seen footage of past Bread and
Puppet performances.  And, as a keynote
address, founder Peter Schumann will deliver one of his fabled "Fiddle
Lectures," a semi-improvised mix of performance and polemic.



A detailed run-down and description of the day’s events can be found at www.bc.edu/BP50.  Advanced registration through this site is
required for the symposium and the 7:00 pm performance by Bread and Puppet of
The 50 Years Cabaret, four short plays drawn from different periods of the
company's history.  The program includes
Dead Man Rises, President & Chair, History of Humanity, and A Man Says
Goodbye To His Mother and will be followed by a public interview of Peter
Schumann by John Bell and an informal reception.  Registration for the full day's events is
$25.  Online registration is open as of
Monday, August 5, 2013 at www.bc.edu/BP50.



Seating for the evening performance is very limited and only registrants for
the day's events will be guaranteed a seat.  Remaining tickets will be made available to
Boston College students and then the general public on a first-come,
first-served basis.



For more information and/or to register, go to www.bc.edu/BP50
or contact the Boston College Theatre Department at 617.552.4012.