The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus

BREAD and PUPPET THEATRE http://breadandpuppet.org/tour-schedule
Contact Josh Krugman — jrkrugman(at)gmail(dot)com — with booking inquiries. There are still some open dates!
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DESCRIPTIONS OF TOURING PRODUCTIONS:
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The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus

The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus is an up-to-the minute version of the iconic Bread and Puppet Circus: a large-scale political puppet spectacle powered by a hot brass band, which borrows from traditional Circus tropes to address the urgent issues of the day.

B&P Director, Peter Schumann, says of The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus: “The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus is a circus of ruthless critique of 6000 years of unhuman history and the uprisings against it, from the battle of Sempach in 1386 when 1300 peasant women and men, equipped with pitchforks and hayrakes overthrew a 4000 strong state-of-the-art army of knights, to the current battles in which ridiculously small numbers of possibilitarians underthrow — from the toes up — the incompetent billionaire democracy again and again.”

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The Basic Bye-bye Show

The Basic Bye-bye Show is a manifesto on transformation, inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts, birch branches lost during an ice storm, and the daily news.

In The Basic Bye-bye Show a series of quiet object fantasies unfolds in black, white, and grey inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words — “Resist,” “Bread,” “Yes,” “Sky,” “Riot,” “Byebye.” Outside, an orchestra of nonsense instruments arises, spins, and recedes. A birch forest grows. Sculpted clouds produce hands, chairs, and rain. The storm passes. The episodes that make up The Basic Byebye Show develop in abstract counterpoint to periodic handkerchief-assisted “basic byebyes” to various brutal unnecessities of our current politics.

B&P director, Peter Schumann, says of the show: “The Basic Bye-bye Show is based on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet – which is why our show proclaims the Possibilitarian’s basic bye-bye to capitalism in order to welcome the 1000 alternatives to this rotten system.”

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Cantastorias from the Possibilitarian Arsenal

Cantastorias from the Possibilitarian Arsenal is a raucous retrospective of Bread and Puppet’s work in this dynamic and democratic medium.

Though Bread and Puppet uses the Italian name (“canta-storia” means sung story in Italian), this versatile form has its roots in India ca. 600 AD and has flourished in various guises all over Europe and Asia for the last 1,500 years — from etoki and kamishibai in Japan, to bankelsang in Germany. Common across this diversely productive history is the performance of pictures through the use of song, movement, text, and puppetry.

For 50 years, Bread and Puppet has performed cantastorias in the streets and on stage to speak to the urgent themes of the moment. This program comprises a selection of 5 Bread and Puppet cantastorias, from The Foot (1982) to From the Possibilitarian Arsenal of Belligerent Slogans (2017), all of which celebrate creative intervention in the face of an intolerable status quo and the beauty and necessity of protest. The pieces demonstrate the range of director, Peter Schumann’s pictorial invention — from woodcuts emulating Dürer’s Apocalypse to wildly expressionistic paintings, as well as the range of the Bread and Puppet ensemble — from impassive Brechtian didacticism to gleeful slapstick dance: all of it, of course, in service of “the Possibilitarian take-over of society.”