![\"Genevieve](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/picBP082210a_1078editW.jpg\")
<\/a>Schumann founded Bread and Puppet on New York City\u2019s Lower East Side in 1963, organizing performances on the streets and in lofts and in churches and creating giant puppets and masks that they marched in protests, especially against the Vietnam War (and then subsequent American wars). The company has toured their pageants and plays and circuses internationally and become one of the iconic and most influential experimental theaters of our era. Bread and Puppet has been based in Vermont since it was in residence at Goddard College in Plainfield in 1970, then at their farm in Glover since 1975.<\/p>\n
Yeuillaz would join Bread and Puppet at the Glover farm during the summers, when the company spent months each year preparing for one August weekend of giant circuses and pageants and numerous smaller shows and side shows, all called the \u201cOur Domestic Resurrection Circus,\u201d which came to attract tens of thousands of audience members.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenevieve Yeuillaz, the Parisian actress whose face resembles the Mona Lisa-like Godface\u2019s, flies over for a holiday month to assist with mask sculpture and to dance and run with a flag and project her fine timing and voice,\u201d Edward Hoagland noted in Vanity Fair<\/a> in July 1983.<\/p>\n But after a man was killed in a fight at the 1998 Glover shows, Bread and Puppet Theater was shaken. Instead of the single giant weekend with its giant audience, it began offering smaller circuses and pageants and \u201cLubberland\u201d shows each weekend throughout July and August to try to spread the crowds out over the summer and make them more safe and manageable.<\/p>\n Longtime puppeteer John Bell (and Cohen\u2019s husband) says, \u201cEspecially after 1998, which was the last \u2018Our Domestic Resurrection Circus,\u2019 a lot of us geezers, older puppeteers, didn\u2019t have time or weren\u2019t able to go all summer. Genevieve was very consistent then. That was very important. I think she helped Peter achieve his vision after the [big] circus ended. I think she became even more important to the theater then.\u201d<\/p>\n Yeuillaz was usually accompanied to Glover by her husband, Remi Paillard<\/a>, who died in January 2021. He was a writer and teacher, who often helped out in the background\u2014building puppets and props, helping manage the stage, erecting giant outdoor exhibitions of Schumann\u2019s paintings and prints.<\/p>\n Together, they were a foundation of the theater. \u201cShe worked as a performer, but also as a director, as a back stage manager sometimes, as a bus loader \u2026 someone who made things happen,\u201d Bell says.<\/p>\n Yeuillaz\u2019s \u201cfather was a pilot in World War II and was shot down over the Mediterranean. So she lost her father early,\u201d Bell says. Her mother raised her in a little Left Bank apartment in Paris in the tight times after the war. She protested in the Paris\u2019s May 1968 demonstrations.<\/p>\n Yeuillaz became a \u201cserious theater actress\u201d and director in Paris, Bell says, and also performed in the 2005 film \u201cLes mots bleus.\u201d She\u2019d perform with Bread and Puppet during the summers, then return to France to perform theater there the rest of the year.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was part of a movement of actors in France to perform in people\u2019s houses,\u201d Bell recalls. \u201cShe had solo shows that she would perform. She would make dinner and perform this monologue in the kitchen and at the end the audience, the people who lived in the house, would all eat together.\u201d<\/p>\n Yeuillaz brought a \u201crigor and focus and seriousness \u2026 and theatrical precision\u201d from French theater to her performances with Bread and Puppet, Bell says. \u201cShe had this aesthetic of work in the theater that to me was different from American theater\u2014which to me usually means Broadway or Hollywood. Genevieve came from a professional practice in the theater in France. The goals are different. The theater in a classic sense. She applied that aesthetic to working with read and Puppet.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe important thing is the way she understood the nature of the [Bread and Puppet] theater and why it was important,\u201d Bell says. \u201cIt would be as if Williem Dafoe from the Wooster Group\u2014before Hollywood\u2014said he had to go to work with Bread and Puppet every summer because this is important.\u201d<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2022 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n In the early 1970s, French actress Genevieve Yeuillaz had a fateful meeting with Peter Schumann, the founder of the landmark experimental and activist Bread and Puppet Theater. She was performing with Theatre de l\u2019Aquarium, an experimental theater based in a former munitions factory in Paris, and attended a workshop Schumann gave in Paris. He subsequently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21767"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21767"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21780,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21767\/revisions\/21780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a>
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