{"id":6922,"date":"2018-04-17T13:49:15","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T17:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=6922"},"modified":"2018-06-03T10:34:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-03T14:34:31","slug":"bread-puppet-basic-bye-bye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/04\/17\/bread-puppet-basic-bye-bye\/","title":{"rendered":"Responding To The Stoneman Douglas Massacre, Bread And Puppet\u2019s Show Imagines Saying Goodbye To Guns"},"content":{"rendered":"

When \u201cThe Basic Bye-bye Show,\u201d<\/a> which Bread and Puppet Theater performs at Boston\u2019s Spontaneous Celebrations<\/a> from April 19 to 22, was developed in performances at the troupe\u2019s Glover, Vermont, farm last summer, it was composed around a series of poetic vignettes saying goodbye to the depredations of capitalism and other failings of our society.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are the things we need to say bye-bye to as a culture?\u201d puppeteer Josh Krugman says. \u201cHow do we bury them and get rid of them?\u201d<\/p>\n

But after 17 people were murdered in mass shooting at a Florida high school on Valentine\u2019s Day, the company revised the script to focus on getting rid of guns.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were rehearsing the show just after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. And we were really inspired by the students at that school and then all over the country who created the #NeverAgain movement,\u201d Krugman says. \u201cWe wanted to create a show that could compliment and speak to that movement and help amplify that movement and help envision the possibility of saying bye-bye to the gun for good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Bread<\/a>
Bread and Puppet Theater performs “Basic Bye-Bye” at its Paper Mache Cathedral in Glover, Vermont, Aug. 19, 2017. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Bread and Puppet Theater, which was founded by Peter Schumann in New York in 1963, is known for its tradition of distributing fresh baked bread free to audiences at the end of performances; its monumental, mythic papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 puppets; and its participation in street protests against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and American torture. The company was also one of the landmark New York experimental theaters of the 1960s\u2014and continues to elaborate its signature blend of vanguard performance, expressionist dance and folk pageantry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Basic Bye-bye\u201d is a chamber puppet show performed in a stage within the stage blockprinted with emphatic texts: \u201cYes,\u201d \u201cLife,\u201d \u201cRain,\u201d \u201cBirth,\u201d \u201cThis,\u201d Water,\u201d \u201cWorld.\u201d At the top corners is a pair of giant papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 wings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe theme is the birth of the gun by the 2nd Amendment Holy Cow, presided over by James Madison, which leads to the routine occurrence of horror and ends with the funeralization of that ill-conceived symbol of a free people,\u201d Schumann has said.<\/p>\n

The show unfolds as a series of dreamlike vignettes or symbolic dances featuring papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 clouds and people and hands; cardboard suns and horses and skeletons and chairs and guns; performers in masks as mothers or goons; pantomiming actors; and musicians playing stringed instruments and crashing cymbals.<\/p>\n

\"Bread<\/a>
Bread and Puppet Theater performs “Basic Bye-Bye” at its Paper Mache Cathedral in Glover, Vermont, Aug. 19, 2017. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe show is a sort of ritual,\u201d Krugman says, \u201ca bye-bye ritual for the gun, a sort of funeral for the gun.\u201d Goodbye, he says, to the gun as a tool to perpetrate massacres, \u201cas an instrument of political influence and economic dependency,\u201d and \u201cas a symbol of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cImplicit in the proposal that the show is making is in order to get rid of something you need an appropriate ritual to do so,\u201d Krugman says. \u201cSometimes you need to create a ritual apparatus that allows people to really digest something, in this case the end of the gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When \u201cThe Basic Bye-bye Show,\u201d which Bread and Puppet Theater performs at Boston\u2019s Spontaneous Celebrations from April 19 to 22, was developed in performances at the troupe\u2019s Glover, Vermont, farm last summer, it was composed around a series of poetic vignettes saying goodbye to the depredations of capitalism and other failings of our society. \u201cWhat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4741,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,110],"tags":[37,13,279,342],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6922"}],"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=6922"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6928,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6922\/revisions\/6928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}