“This death of Gaza is not chaotic, it is scheduled,” a narrator says during Bread and Puppet Theater’s “Oh You Beast Descendants.” “…Its aim is not to subdue an enemy, but to eliminate a people’s capacity to exist.”
The performance is a mix of dance and ritual, proclamations and singing, with masked women cradling corpses and threatening masked goons, with giant puppet birds, monstrous beasts, and towering gods, performed in Bread and Puppet’s Paper Maché Cathedral and across the fields and in their Museum of Anti-Modern Art at their farm in Glover, Vermont, on Friday nights from June to August, 2025.
“We human beasts, descendants of revenge and elimination gods, and of the gods of love who preach by killing love, how can we survive while our very own evil empire promotes incinerations and starvation warfare and supreme inhumanity is performed in front of our eyes?,” Bread and Puppet says on its website. “We, the numerous people here on the face of the earth, we occupants of not knowing where else to be, living in the jungle of beastly minutes, need Mother Dirt to rebirth our joy muscles, strip us of our horror inhumanity, and make water and bread of life obligatory.”
