“And if our yelling does not reach their uninterested ears? Will we invent new yells that are harder to neglect?” asks Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater in its terrific and furious and horrifying “The Hope Principle Show: Citizens’ Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide.” The performance at Somerville’s Center for the Arts at the Armory last night, which our friends in the theater are touring this spring, is their response to Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza, which local health authorities say has killed more than 33,000 people, in answer to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2024, attack on Israel which killed 1,200 people and kidnapped as many as 250.
“The Hope Principle Show” begins with a woman announcing the name of the show and pointing with a stick to a banner painted with a depiction of a naked woman laying on her side with roots growing down from her belly: “Here you see Mother Dirt, burning, giving birth to the civilization tree—and its offspring, the chairs.” Performers hold flat cardboard paintings of chairs that they wave up and down in time to a faster and faster marching snare drum. The chairs part to reveal a seated woman who says, “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us?”
The show and performers’ costumes are all in black and white—except for the orange and yellow of fire and, later, the brown of soldiers’ uniforms. The show is an experimental theater performance of masks and giant puppets, dances, flag waving, painted banners, letters and essays, of spoken word poetry and chants, singing and violin and a brass band. The show is not a narrative, but a series of ideas and tableaus collaged one against the other—dances of chairs and caribou and skeletons, contemplations of hope and homeland and wishes, harrowing accounts from Gaza. It is an indictment of Israel’s war on Gaza—and the United States’ support of that war.
A man announces the first “Dance of Death.” A performer costumed as a skeleton picks up a box labeled “Anonymous” and a woman clad in white pulls a mask from the box, a flat sheet of cardboard with a face sketched on it, and puts it on. They dance to a violin rendition of the sacred harp song “Calvary,” until the woman falls to the floor, intended to symbolize death’s anonymous victim.
The curtain opens to reveal performers at the right wearing flat paper masks with goofily sinister toothy grins. They stand in front of a backdrop painted with heads and arms and legs upon a black field of trees. It reads “Citizens’ Shame” at the bottom corners and stars labeled “hope” shoot through the sky. The woman returns to ask her questions again: “Who are we?” The masked performers slowly stomp toward the left, waving their hands and gobbling and growling between each question “Where do we come from? … What awaits us?” A chime rings. The performers rip off their masks, throw them to the floor, then line up facing the back of the stage with their arms raised as if under arrest.
The curtain closes, the “Dance of Death” repeats—director and Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann’s theatrical structures often recall music with repetitions of themes and variations. Then the curtain opens for a slow poetic dance of six performers costumed as caribou—flat cardboard heads, tree branch antlers, bodies made from white sheets suspended from sticks. A man comes in and holds up a box fan that blows. The caribou turn their heads to the right. Then the performers remove their costumes and ask the questions: “Who are we? … What awaits us?”
A crankie is carried onto the stage, with a painted scroll inside that is slowly unspooled, showing abstracted landscapes, military bombers, families with horse-drawn wagons, bulldozers, birds. A man sings-shouts along with plucked and bowed violin: “‘Once we have grasped what we human beings really are there arises in the world something that shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: Homeland’—Ernst Bloch, German-Jewish philosopher in ‘The Principle of Hope,’ a huge study of hope which he wrote during the Second World War as the Nazi genocide, which he narrowly escaped, unfolded in Europe. … ‘What is a homeland? Is it these two chairs sitting in this room. …. What is a homeland? Is it our son? Fathers? Sons? Our illusions about them? A picture of Jerusalem on the wall? What is a homeland? … A homeland is where none of this can happen.’—Ghassan Kanafani, expelled from Palestine at the age of 7 by Zionist militias in 1948, he was assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972.”
The caribou dance repeats. The curtain closes and the third “Dance of Death” is danced by a skeleton and lady hand-puppets atop the curtain to a violin.
The curtain opens and cardboard bodies are shockingly thrown from offstage onto the floor. Two performers playing silly squeaky kazoos march in three small marionette soldiers who examine one of the bodies, drop it, then exit.
“We are never free of wishes,” a woman announces. A giant puppet bird enters through the back curtain, with a papier-mâché head on a stick, white sheet body, and fringe wings. The bird dances to cymbal clashing and snare drumming. “It would be more comfortable to forget this longing rather than to fulfill it, but what would this lead to today? These wishes certainly would not stop.” The bird eventually lays down upon the stage. “If the inclination to improve our lot does not sleep even in our sleep how should it do so when we are awake?” Performers pick up the bodies and dance them with the bird—and scream to wild drumming—then exit.
The curtain closes and the person costumed as a skeleton and the lady in white return for the fourth “Dance of Death.”
The curtain opens and two performers stand upon chairs in front of a banner painted with a skeleton sprouting pink roses. They take turns reading “A letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Dr. Tariq M. Haddad, cardiologist and professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.” In the letter, the doctor declines an invitation to a roundtable on “Gaza genocide” due to “knowing this administration’s policies have been responsible for the death of over 80 of my family members, including dozens of children, the suffering of hundreds of my remaining family, the famine my family is currently subjected to, and the destruction of all of my family’s homes.”
The letter recounts details as a performer costumed as a black raven with cardboard wings dances to violin and cymbal chime above a tableau of naked people puppets. “There’s a medical acronym unique to the Gaza Strip being frequently used that I have never heard any physician in the Western world use: WCNSF, which stands for ‘wounded child no surviving family.’ Secretary Blinken this is a stain on our family that this acronym exists.” Haddad recounts his cousins’ home being blasted by the Israeli military—killing three cousins and his aunt. He recounts flyers dropped on northern Gaza by the Israeli military telling them to leave or they may be identified “as a partner of a terrorist origination. Sec. Blinken, assuming that an innocent civilians do not leave their homes with nowhere safe to go anyway that they will be identified as military targets, if that is not the definition of collective punishment and genocide, I don’t know what is.”
To a sad violin rendition of “Calvary,” two stilters wearing star masks approach the pile of cardboard bodies, open their arms over them, retreat, then approach again and repeat.
A banner is brought out showing a man on fire, a performer rings a chime, then recounts how Senior U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself afire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in February 2024: “His final words were ‘Free Palestine.’”
The banner exits, then performers raise and dance a giant, calm-faced papier-mâché head with flat cardboard hands and a body of small nude people. A woman sits and reads: “The wish builds up and creates the real. The new thought finally breaks out into the open, unfinished, reeling world. … The tomorrow in today is alive.”
The giant puppet exists through the back curtain and a band of violins, flutes, drum and accordions plays off-kilter music as the performers call out an “oratorio”: “We who are not dead yet are born civilized, civilized meaning into a civilization, a civilization that routinely produces large quantities of dead.” Schumann, who was not present, makes a poetry from fracturing the official speak, the attacks and euphemisms, of government communications and journalism. “And if our yelling does not reach their uninterested ears? Will we invent new yells that are harder to neglect? … Where are the preventers and stoppers of this ultimate brutality? And has our bombing-hospitals civilization lost its right to exist?”
The group sings an old sacred harp choral song. Then they announce: “And we, aren’t we meant for our birthright, the original glorious whole, which obliges us to our habitual and extra habitual everyday euphoria—and obliges us to fight the genociders.”
The show ends with a group waving flags printed with the word “Yes” above a depiction of red roses. They run with their flags around the theater, as a brass band launches into the classic New Orleans gospel funeral march “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
Bread and Puppet Theater is scheduled to perform “The Hope Principle Show: Citizens’ Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at UMass Amherst on Friday, April 19, 2024; at Mayo Street Arts in Portland, Maine, on Saturday, April 20; and at the Worcester Firehouse on Sunday, April 21. Ticket prices vary: https://breadandpuppet.org/tour-schedule. After each show they will serve their famous sourdough rye bread with aioli.
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