{"id":24739,"date":"2024-04-19T11:16:01","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T15:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=24739"},"modified":"2024-04-19T11:28:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T15:28:02","slug":"bread-and-puppet-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2024\/04\/19\/bread-and-puppet-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Bread And Puppet Theater\u2019s Indictment Of War On Gaza: \u2018Hope Principle Show\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cAnd if our yelling does not reach their uninterested ears? Will we invent new yells that are harder to neglect?\u201d asks Vermont\u2019s Bread and Puppet Theater in its terrific and furious and horrifying \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide.\u201d<\/a> The performance at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory last night, which our friends in the theater are touring this spring, is their response to Israel\u2019s ongoing attack on Gaza, which local health authorities say has killed more than 33,000 people, in answer to Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7, 2024, attack on Israel which killed 1,200 people and kidnapped as many as 250.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Hope Principle Show\u201d begins with a woman announcing the name of the show and pointing with a stick to a banner painted with a depiction of a naked woman laying on her side with roots growing down from her belly: \u201cHere you see Mother Dirt, burning, giving birth to the civilization tree\u2014and its offspring, the chairs.\u201d Performers hold flat cardboard paintings of chairs that they wave up and down in time to a faster and faster marching snare drum. The chairs part to reveal a seated woman who says, \u201cWho are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The show and performers\u2019 costumes are all in black and white\u2014except for the orange and yellow of fire and, later, the brown of soldiers\u2019 uniforms. The show is an experimental theater performance of masks and giant puppets, dances, flag waving, painted banners, letters and essays, of spoken word poetry and chants, singing and violin and a brass band. The show is not a narrative, but a series of ideas and tableaus collaged one against the other\u2014dances of chairs and caribou and skeletons, contemplations of hope and homeland and wishes, harrowing accounts from Gaza. It is an indictment of Israel\u2019s war on Gaza\u2014and the United States\u2019 support of that war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A man announces the first \u201cDance of Death.\u201d A performer costumed as a skeleton picks up a box labeled \u201cAnonymous\u201d and a woman clad in white pulls a mask from the box, a flat sheet of cardboard with a face sketched on it, and puts it on. They dance to a violin rendition of the sacred harp song \u201cCalvary,\u201d until the woman falls to the floor, intended to symbolize death\u2019s anonymous victim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The curtain opens to reveal performers at the right wearing flat paper masks with goofily sinister toothy grins. They stand in front of a backdrop painted with heads and arms and legs upon a black field of trees. It reads \u201cCitizens\u2019 Shame\u201d at the bottom corners and stars labeled \u201chope\u201d shoot through the sky. The woman returns to ask her questions again: \u201cWho are we?\u201d The masked performers slowly stomp toward the left, waving their hands and gobbling and growling between each question \u201cWhere do we come from? \u2026 What awaits us?\u201d A chime rings. The performers rip off their masks, throw them to the floor, then line up facing the back of the stage with their arms raised as if under arrest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The curtain closes, the \u201cDance of Death\u201d repeats\u2014director and Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann\u2019s theatrical structures often recall music with repetitions of themes and variations. Then the curtain opens for a slow poetic dance of six performers costumed as caribou\u2014flat cardboard heads, tree branch antlers, bodies made from white sheets suspended from sticks. A man comes in and holds up a box fan that blows. The caribou turn their heads to the right. Then the performers remove their costumes and ask the questions: \u201cWho are we? \u2026 What awaits us?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A crankie is carried onto the stage, with a painted scroll inside that is slowly unspooled, showing abstracted landscapes, military bombers, families with horse-drawn wagons, bulldozers, birds. A man sings-shouts along with plucked and bowed violin: \u201c\u2018Once we have grasped what we human beings really are there arises in the world something that shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: Homeland\u2019\u2014Ernst Bloch, German-Jewish philosopher in \u2018The Principle of Hope,\u2019 a huge study of hope which he wrote during the Second World War as the Nazi genocide, which he narrowly escaped, unfolded in Europe. \u2026 \u2018What is a homeland? Is it these two chairs sitting in this room. \u2026. What is a homeland? Is it our son? Fathers? Sons? Our illusions about them? A picture of Jerusalem on the wall? What is a homeland? \u2026 A homeland is where none of this can happen.\u2019\u2014Ghassan Kanafani, expelled from Palestine at the age of 7 by Zionist militias in 1948, he was assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The caribou dance repeats. The curtain closes and the third \u201cDance of Death\u201d is danced by a skeleton and lady hand-puppets atop the curtain to a violin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The curtain opens and cardboard bodies are shockingly thrown from offstage onto the floor. Two performers playing silly squeaky kazoos march in three small marionette soldiers who examine one of the bodies, drop it, then exit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are never free of wishes,\u201d a woman announces. A giant puppet bird enters through the back curtain, with a papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 head on a stick, white sheet body, and fringe wings. The bird dances to cymbal clashing and snare drumming. \u201cIt would be more comfortable to forget this longing rather than to fulfill it, but what would this lead to today? These wishes certainly would not stop.\u201d The bird eventually lays down upon the stage. \u201cIf the inclination to improve our lot does not sleep even in our sleep how should it do so when we are awake?\u201d Performers pick up the bodies and dance them with the bird\u2014and scream to wild drumming\u2014then exit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The curtain closes and the person costumed as a skeleton and the lady in white return for the fourth \u201cDance of Death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The curtain opens and two performers stand upon chairs in front of a banner painted with a skeleton sprouting pink roses. They take turns reading \u201cA letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken from Dr. Tariq M. Haddad, cardiologist and professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.\u201d In the letter, the doctor declines an invitation to a roundtable on \u201cGaza genocide\u201d due to \u201cknowing this administration\u2019s policies have been responsible for the death of over 80 of my family members, including dozens of children, the suffering of hundreds of my remaining family, the famine my family is currently subjected to, and the destruction of all of my family\u2019s homes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The letter recounts details as a performer costumed as a black raven with cardboard wings dances to violin and cymbal chime above a tableau of naked people puppets. \u201cThere\u2019s a medical acronym unique to the Gaza Strip being frequently used that I have never heard any physician in the Western world use: WCNSF, which stands for \u2018wounded child no surviving family.\u2019 Secretary Blinken this is a stain on our family that this acronym exists.\u201d Haddad recounts his cousins\u2019 home being blasted by the Israeli military\u2014killing three cousins and his aunt. He recounts flyers dropped on northern Gaza by the Israeli military telling them to leave or they may be identified \u201cas a partner of a terrorist origination. Sec. Blinken, assuming that an innocent civilians do not leave their homes with nowhere safe to go anyway that they will be identified as military targets, if that is not the definition of collective punishment and genocide, I don\u2019t know what is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To a sad violin rendition of \u201cCalvary,\u201d two stilters wearing star masks approach the pile of cardboard bodies, open their arms over them, retreat, then approach again and repeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A banner is brought out showing a man on fire, a performer rings a chime, then recounts how Senior U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself afire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in February 2024: \u201cHis final words were \u2018Free Palestine.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The banner exits, then performers raise and dance a giant, calm-faced papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 head with flat cardboard hands and a body of small nude people. A woman sits and reads: \u201cThe wish builds up and creates the real. The new thought finally breaks out into the open, unfinished, reeling world. \u2026 The tomorrow in today is alive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The giant puppet exists through the back curtain and a band of violins, flutes, drum and accordions plays off-kilter music as the performers call out an \u201coratorio\u201d: \u201cWe who are not dead yet are born civilized, civilized meaning into a civilization, a civilization that routinely produces large quantities of dead.\u201d Schumann, who was not present, makes a poetry from fracturing the official speak, the attacks and euphemisms, of government communications and journalism. \u201cAnd if our yelling does not reach their uninterested ears? Will we invent new yells that are harder to neglect? \u2026 Where are the preventers and stoppers of this ultimate brutality? And has our bombing-hospitals civilization lost its right to exist?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The group sings an old sacred harp choral song. Then they announce: \u201cAnd we, aren\u2019t we meant for our birthright, the original glorious whole, which obliges us to our habitual and extra habitual everyday euphoria\u2014and obliges us to fight the genociders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show ends with a group waving flags printed with the word \u201cYes\u201d above a depiction of red roses. They run with their flags around the theater, as a brass band launches into the classic New Orleans gospel funeral march \u201cJust a Closer Walk with Thee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Bread and Puppet Theater is scheduled to perform \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide\u201d<\/a> at UMass Amherst on Friday, April 19, 2024; at Mayo Street Arts in Portland, Maine, on Saturday, April 20; and at the Worcester Firehouse on Sunday, April 21. Ticket prices vary: https:\/\/breadandpuppet.org\/tour-schedule<\/a>. After each show they will serve their famous sourdough rye bread with aioli.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\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 2024 or the respective creato<\/em>rs.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Bread
Bread and Puppet Theater’s \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide” at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at the Armory, April 18, 2024. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAnd if our yelling does not reach their uninterested ears? Will we invent new yells that are harder to neglect?\u201d asks Vermont\u2019s Bread and Puppet Theater in its terrific and furious and horrifying \u201cThe Hope Principle Show: Citizens\u2019 Shame and Hope in the Time of Genocide.\u201d The performance at Somerville\u2019s Center for the Arts at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24747,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,110],"tags":[13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24739"}],"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=24739"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24769,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24739\/revisions\/24769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}