“Through all the world below / God is seen all around / Search hills and valleys / Through there she’s found,” sing the performers, all clad in white, as they circle a giant puppet, with grain hair and a white smock printed with flowers, that they had raised up at the edge of the Pine Forest early in Bread and Puppet Theater’s “Upside Down World Resurrection Pageant.” On they sing: “The growing of the corn / The lily and the thorn / The pleasant and the forlorn / All declare / God is there / In the meadows dressed in green / There she’s seen.”
It is July 26, on Bread and Puppet’s farm in Glover, Vermont. There the company performs the Pageant each Sunday afternoon from July 19 to Aug. 30, 2026.
The pageant begins immediately at the end of the 3 p.m. Circus. Performers carry a giant puppet head, through the crowd, up the hill, accompanied by a brass band and performers waving flags. They lead the crowd to the top of the hill, to the edge of the Pine Forest, erecting the giant puppet, and sing.
Performers then lead the crowd into the Pine Forest for a “memorial dance.” Performers tie the giant puppet upright to trees. Then performers invite the crowd to join them in long line dances, waving arms and hands up and down, touching trees, as they wind through the forest. A woman calls out memorials to Palestinian and Iranian dead, reading testimonies tied to the trees:
A family “killed in Israeli airstrike” in Gaza in which “3-year-old Sami Abu Qassem was wounded and survived”; “15 aid workers killed” in Rafah; more than 100 people killed in Gaza City when “Israeli missile struck a mosque during morning prayer”; 118 killed when “Israeli forces opened fire on crowds seeking food aid” in Gaza City; a pregnant mother and her 4-year-old and 2-year-old sons “killed in Israeli airstrike” on Gaza; more than 33 killed when “Israeli missiles struck a school” in Nuseirat Refugee Camp; more than 170 Iranians killed, including 120 children, when the U.S. bombed an elementary school at the start of the war on Iran in February 2026; a 6-year-old “shot and killed by Israeli forces” east of Gaza City on July 8, 2026; 10-year-old Motzaz Marwan Abu Shaar shot dead by Israeli fores while “playing inside his family’s displacement tent” in Rafah on July 15, 2026.
Performers finally lead the crowd back out of the forest, to a hillside overlooking rolling fields bound at the far edges by trees. Slowly, a line of performers, carrying black and white chairs painted on flat sheets of cardboard, walk in from the left and wind up the middle. A line of performers in flat, black and white heads and hands follow the chairs. Three giant white legs stand up at the far right, at the Bread House, and make their way to the center, accompanied by a bass drummer. A row of performers, carrying black and white banners, painted with people with their hands up, move from left to center. A white-masked figure in a black cloak, and carrying a tall staff with a black flag flapping from it, winds through the fields, down the right, across the middle, to a strings trio. All but the figure in the black cloak and the strings trio converge on a giant god puppet, a great brown head and hands, that appears from the far tree line and slowly moves down the hills toward the center.
The performers wearing black and white heads seem to push the legs down. A man clacks a device on a stick and all fall down except the god. A violinist in the strings trio sings Bach into a megaphone, calling for mercy on me. Trumpets. The god opens its giant hands. Chimes. The legs rise back up. The violinist walks to the god and speaks in German while a man translates:
“I sat on a stone / and put one leg over another / on top of my knee I put my elbow / into the palm of my hand I put my chin and one cheek / and in this position I thought for a long time / how to live in this world / and I did not have an answer.”
