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NOLANGUAGE | The Return of Ulysses | Decapitalization Circus

presented in partnership with the Boston Center for the Arts as part of the Cyclorama Residency Series

The award-winning Bread and Puppet Theater, featuring Artistic Director Peter Schumann and his troupe of Vermont puppeteers, returns for a fifth year to the BCA’s Cyclorama bringing their signature powerful imagery, masked characters, and giant papier-mâché puppets. This year, their residency includes two different puppet performances, “The Return of Ulysses," family-friendly matinees “Decapitalization Circus” along with NOLANGUAGE, a week-long political art installation.

Although all Bread and Puppet events have a seriousness of purpose — a few laughs are always thrown in!For this residency at the Cyclorama, the Bread and Puppet touring company includes Schumann, along with Maura Gahan, Greg Corbino, Maryann Colella, Susie Perkins, among others. Both the evening and matinee performances will be performed by the company and a large number of local volunteers and musicians, including the popular Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band, who is the host band for the yearly HONK! Festival held in Davis Square.

In addition to Peter Schumann’s NOLANGUAGE art installation, the Cyclorama will also be decorated with the unique Bread and Puppet collection of powerful black-line posters, banners, masks, curtains, programs and set-props. All pieces are created by Schumann, including sculpting and painting all the major masks and puppets, with input from the company. After each evening performance there will be an opportunity to savor Schumann's famous sourdough rye bread, smeared with garlic aioli; and there will also be many opportunities during the week to purchase the theater's legendary "cheap art."

Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally recognized company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art that is filled with music, dance and slapstick. Its performances are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper maché and cardboard, a brass band for accompaniment, and anti-elitist dance. Most are morality plays — about how people act toward each other — whose prototype is "Everyman." There are puppets of all kinds and sizes, masks, sculptural costumes, paintings, buildings and landscapes that seemingly breathe with Schumann's distinctive visual style of dance, expressionism, dark humor and low-culture simplicity.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

The Return of Ulysses
Thursday, Jan 27 - Sunday, Jan 30 | 7pm

Decapitalization Circus - family-friendly matinees
Saturday, Jan 29 & Sunday, Jan 30 | 4 pm

NOLANGUAGE - visual art installation
Monday, Jan 24 - Sunday, Jan 30

ABOUT BREAD & PUPPET THEATER
The Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in this country. It was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City's Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand-puppet performances for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police and other problems of that neighborhood. More complex theater pieces, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners, followed. 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 1970 Bread & Puppet moved to Vermont as theater-in-residence at Goddard College, combining puppetry with gardening and bread baking in a serious way, learning to live in the countryside and letting itself be influenced by the experience. In 1974 the Theater 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 performances, was presented annually through 1998.

Through invitations by Grace Paley, Bread and Puppet Theater became a frequent attraction at anti-Vietnam War events in the '60s and '70s. By the '80s, the puppets had become emblematic of activist pacifism and a sine qua non of American political theater, as exemplified by the massive, ascending figures that are burned into the memory of anyone who marched with or saw the haunting, massive June 12, 1982 Disarmament Parade in New York City.

Since its move to Glover, VT, Theater for the New City has been the company's New York home. It has performed one or more productions at TNC each year since 1981. The company also appeared at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in 2007. In Boston, Bread and Puppet Theater has had a consistent presence since early on, most recently as an annual partner in the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama Residency Series.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions both on the American continent and abroad and from sales of Bread & Puppet Press's posters and publications. Internationally, Bread and Puppet Theater performs massive spectacles with hundreds of participants, sometimes devoted to social, political and environmental issues and sometimes simply to the trials of everyday life. The traveling puppet performances range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers. At most performances, the company distributes bread and aioli (garlic sauce) to the audience.