A dance of puppet horses honors the healthcare workers of wartime Gaza. A violinist leads a parade of people carrying banners depicting screaming trees. A performer masked as a woman emerges from behind the tree banners and is struck down by the whistling of bombs. Earth brown puppets depicting people dance as a narrator recounts the story of 6-year-old Hind Raja, who was the only survivor after her family’s car was shot and shelled by Israeli forces as they were trying to drive away from the fighting in Gaza City in January, but died after Israeli forces bombed an ambulance attempting to rescue her.
Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann has described the show—which the company performs at their home in Glover, Vermont, each Saturday and Sunday from July 13 to Aug. 31, 2024, and plans for a tour to Lawrence and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Midwest in the fall—as: “tigers teaching the congress of cowards how to jump over billionaires and acquire the courage to not pay for the atrocities of the latest genocide; the proverbial sheep of The system refusing to be sheep and committing revolution against the system; and the blue horses of the peace and harmony terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population and then galloping over the ruins of the truth industry.”
The circus changes as acts are added and cut each week. Shows performed on July 27 and 28 included:
• Death knocking down humanity with a scythe, before the people get back up and kick death.
• “Butchers” in white masks and black hats and outfits feed flat cardboard cutouts of a cow, a flower and a woman to a monster. Then a chorus rises singing a song urging workers and soldiers to revolt against war: “War is murder of the masses. … War is the death wage of the bosses. … See the fascist profits gather.”
• A dance celebrates the tent of student protestors and refugees and the unhoused: “Oh, then who can shelter you from rain but cannot keep away the bombs?”
• A comedic fake trapeze act.
• “Peace and Happiness Terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom Calisthenics” led in raucous, silly dances by Peter Schumann.
• Fiddlers lead (costumed) buffalos down the hillside through the crowd to the circus ring for an act honoring the long-jailed indigenous activist Leonard Peltier and other “political prisoners”—“this continues the U.S. policy of genocide against its indigenous population.”
• A (costumed) raven, garbageman and star dance in honor of Bobby Cleverdon, a longtime Bread & Puppet performer who died this spring.
• A Rotten Idea Theater Company skit about women’s reproductive rights, the environment and fascists in the face of immunity bestowed upon presidents by the Supreme Court.
• Performers wave white flags depicting black boots in a battle with a giant puppet Grim Reaper riding a skeleton horse.
• Performers honor mothers with a dance around a giant mother and infant puppet.
• A dance of giant puppets— a red spinning character, a blue head, a green head, a lion and tiger. Then rotten clowns battle the “Grasshoppers of the Possibilitarian System … We will show you how to hop over insurmountable problems.”
A fall circus tour is planned, including performances in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on Sept. 2; in Brooklyn, New York, on Sept. 5; in Easthampton, Massachusetts, on Sept. 6; in Portland, Maine, on Sept. 7; in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sept. 8. The tour then head west to Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
