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)

Save the art of protest!

A Scramble to Save Protest Art, from Ferguson to Hong Kong
by Laura C. Mallonee, Hyperallergic, December 12, 2014

Manifesta opens the way to the art of resistance in Russia

Allowed a Space in Russia for Criticism, Artists Have Fun With It
by Sally McGrane, The New York Times, October 9, 2014

Legos @Large: works by Ai Weiwei at Alcatraz

Art Man of Alcatraz
Ai Weiwei Takes His Work to a Prison
by Jori Finkel, The New York Times, September 18, 2014

Chelsea gallery surveys post-Fukushima theme of Japanese artists

On View | Japanese Artists Respond to Fukushima
by Sylvia Rupani-Smith, The New York Times, June 26, 2014

"Go forth where?" An artist challenges Levi's

In this 2011 video, citizen-artist LaToya Ruby Frazier uses her power as an artist to throw serious questions (and shade) at jeans manufacturer Levi's.

What is the responsibility of an artist to her community? In this film, artist and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier discusses the economic and environmental decline of her hometown—Braddock, Pennsylvania—the city that the clothing company Levi's used as inspiration and backdrop for a major advertising campaign in 2010. Having photographed in Braddock since she was sixteen years old, LaToya's black-and-white images of her family and their surroundings present a stark contrast to the campaign images of "urban pioneers" and slogans such as "everybody's work is equally important." In a performance developed in collaboration with the artist Liz Magic Laser, LaToya carries out a choreographed series of movements on the sidewalk in front of the temporary Levi's Photo Workshop in SoHo. Wearing a costume of ordinary Levi's clothes, the artist's repetitive and relentless motion ultimately destroys the jeans she's wearing. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982, Braddock, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in New Brunswick, New Jersey and New York, New York.