The political spectacle of Bread and Puppet Theater

Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater
returns to New York for a December season.
(photos courtesy of Bread and Puppet Theater)

The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger.

During the Vietnam War, Bread and puppet staged block-long processions and pageants involving hundreds of people. In 1974 Bread and Puppet moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Read more and connect with Bread and Puppet Theater here. Volunteers are welcome for the theater's upcoming events in New York:

Upcoming shows and art auction 

at Theater for the New City

The Overtakelessness Circus
Saturdays-Sundays
December 12-13, 19-20 at 3pm

The Seditious Conspiracy Theater Presents: A monument to the Puerto Rican Political Prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera
Wednesday-Sunday
December 16-20 at 8pm

Bread and Puppet Theater Art Auction (live auctioneer and band)
Friday, December 18at 9:30pm

Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Out and about: Vermont Performance Lab's September festival

Dahlia Nayar
(photo courtesy of Vermont Performance Lab)

Vermont Performance Lab's Progressive Performance Festival (September 4-6) welcomes Lab resident artists Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, presenting the US premiere of The Round, "a 90-minute experimental site work that combines movement, media technology, theatricality and sound installation with community involvement."

Audiences members, each equipped with ear-buds and their own smartphone, follow instructions for individual choreographed journeys around downtown Brattleboro. These experiences, the artists suggest, "will interrogate and alter our relationship with a familiar mobile phone technology, raising questions about the uses and potentials implicit in its ubiquitous presence in our lives."

Other festival events include:

Schwanze-Beast by Cuban-American feminist performers Carmelita Tropicana + Ela Troyano--"equal parts performance, scientific lecture and installation...the future becomes a lens through which to examine our present cultural landscape. The status of the animal species and their civil rights is closely tied to climate change and the preservation of all species, as well as class issues, immigration, sexual preference, race and gender."

Dahlia Nayar's dance and sound installation, 2125 Stanley Street, "influenced in part by her experiences growing up outside of Chicago with parents from India and the Philippines."

Vermont Performance Lab is a new type of performance incubator in the foothills of Vermont. VPL takes creation of new work beyond the walls of the studio and into the community by fostering experimental approaches to research and performance.

For a complete description and schedule of VPL's Progressive Performance Festival events, click here.

Submit your poetry for the Walt Whitman First Book Award

Rae Armantrout
photo by Rosanne Olson

Walt Whitman First Book Award Deadline: December 1

Submit your manuscript today.

The Walt Whitman Award brings first-book publication, a cash prize of $5,000, and a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center to an American who has never before published a book of poetry. The Academy also purchases thousands of copies of the book for distribution to our members, and promotes the winning poet on Poets.org and in American Poet.

This year's judge is Pulitzer Prize- winning poet Rae Armantrout. 

Past winners of the prize include April Bernard, Nicole Cooley, Suji Kwock Kim, Alberto Rios, and Matt Rasmussen, whose 2012 Walt Whitman Award winning manuscript, Black Aperture, is a finalist for this year's National Book Award.