With temperatures hovering around zero, we went to see Bread and Puppet Theater perform “Life and Death Precision Dances with Happiness Obligation Prologue” on Feb. 8, 2026, the last performance of a series of winter shows in the wood-stove-heated upstairs Ballroom at the company’s snowbound Glover, Vermont, farm from December 2025 to February 2026.
“Happiness Obligation Prologue” was a cantestoria–guided by a banner painted sort of like a comic book with images and symbols guiding the performers in dances and singing and pantomiming and shouting. Including “Jolly brain and body wiggling” and “Singing and yelling in public places which are deprived of happiness” and “Happiness students and applicants from all walks of life must not act solositically but in communion with other.” Performers rolled on the floor and danced a kicking chorus line.
For “Pertinent slogans for the moment at hand,” the white-clad cast of 11 pointed at the slogan “Bread not bombs” on the banner, then a woman holding loaf of bread and man with simple wooden plane lead a procession to drop the loaf on a table.
A narrator announced, “The astounding results”–cymbal clash!–“Immediate resignation of the incompetent government.”
“The resulting intoxicated life shuns all ordinariness and declares pea soup to be as holy as the holy grail.”
“The exalted in which we exist”–angel puppets sang “Aaah!”–“demands our exhaltation”–all the cast sang “Hallelujah!”
This was immediately followed by “Life and Death Precision Dances,” which included performers rolling on the floor, throwing clothes around, a dance with flat cardboard skeletons, listening for birds, then dancing with arms out flapping like birds.
A narrator read: “Today, when we are faced with a new war and the ultimate destruction, want to dedicate this show to 3-month-old Ali Abo al-Zour and 6-month-old Youssef Abu Hammad, who died from extreme cold and dehydration caused by exposure to sewage pollution in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. According to Munir al-Bursh, director of the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, this is not a natural disaster, but a man-mande humanitarian catastrophe, the result of occupation, seige, war, and international silence.”
An “Upsidedown World” parade marched across the stage of giant upsidedown puppets labeled Mr. Business As Usual, Mr. Money, Mrs. Death, Citizen, Migrant.
The show concluded with Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann performing a fiddle sermon on a custom instrument: “The good which is our life / is ephermerally eternal. / And men to survive the bad, the obvious evil, eat kids and their moms alive. / And this politcal and elected and systematic. / Having turned language upsidedown, peace means atrocity and freedom means millions of dollars and makes the customers of oppression be the oppressors. / Not by choice but by status quo. / Not the apocalypse, but the upheaval against what would be apocalypse. / Against the congress of cowards who steal the population’s hard-earned money and give it to the genociders. / Rising up in body and spirit requesting the real life instead of the fake life of the doomed politics as the public our own birth-right life which starts right now. It marches on and on. / It must not be stopped ever. / End of sermon.”
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