I was your typical teen — skeptical of authority, fascinated by revolution, a furnace of angst with an empty velcro wallet. It was almost Halloween, and I was alight with self-righteous fury at being told I was too old to trick-or-treat. Then, in a moment of inspiration, the only avenue forward was revealed to me: papier-mâché. I had all the ingredients at home and, most importantly, it gave me the chaotic freedom of anonymity.
I proceeded to craft an enormous bucket of a papier-mâché mask that encased my entire upper body: a cartoonish goat head with a gaping mouth I could just barely peek out of. Identity transformed, my quest for free candy was back on track. To be honest, I don’t think I was fooling anyone with this endeavor, but no one could have said anything to my newly-empowered teenage self.
I love this memory, because I think it demonstrates how we can intuitively interact and share space with the history of an artform even when we aren’t explicitly aware of that history. What I couldn’t have known that Halloween — angry as I was at “the system” — was that when I donned that giant papier-mâché mask, I was participating in a subversive culture of protest puppetry.
Peter Schumann, Population Puppet, 1995 (Center for Puppetry Arts, Atlanta).
I first saw one of Bread & Puppet Theater’s population puppets on display at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, where I now work. The towering papier-mâché mask is attached to a bedsheet body, articulated on each side by a massive cardboard hand. The sense of reverence it commands is remarkable given that this puppet would never have been performed alone. Population puppets are fairly generic creations in the Bread & Puppet canon; anywhere from 30 to 100 population puppets would appear in a single performance together, puppeteered overheard by small teams of people, simulating crowds of innocents that lived and died at the violent whims of the oppressor. This oppressor manifests in many forms across their works — monickered as butchers, suits, and billionaires, they are all bound together in their mission to “mow down vast populations of helpless bas-relief figures.” It is strange, then, to pass this lone survivor in the context of a puppetry museum; while it was donated to the Center’s collection in 1995, I can’t help but see its raised hands in a new light, given the summer protests of 2020.1
Bread & Puppet Theater was founded in New York in 1963 and has done more than any other theater or artist to popularize papier-mâché puppetry as an artform. From its inception, Bread & Puppet was a project of radical politics, orchestrating massive works of street theater in protest of the Vietnam War. One of the theater’s long-time participants dubbed it a “school for survival in the typhoon of capitalism.” The puppets are larger than life, with a wide variety of papier-mâché creations outside of just population puppets; as co-founder and director Peter Schumann explained, these puppets “can say things that actors and dramatists can’t say — just by their size.” Their materials have just as much to say.2
Bread & Puppet idealizes cheap art. The way these papier-mâché puppets are brought into existence is astonishingly normal — it mostly involves working from clay, which is sculpted and then covered in strips of glue-saturated newspaper. The masks are then given time to dry (a process that I remember my teenage self agonizing over, collecting every box fan I could find to speed things up) and, once dry, pried from the clay base and painted.3 The expectation is that these puppets will all break down, whether suddenly or gradually; they are understood and accepted for their liminal nature. In his flyer “The Importance of Cheap Art,” Peter Schumann argued that “cheap art defies, ridicules, undermines and makes obsolete the sanctity of affluent-society economy.”4
Why Cheap Art? manifesto (1984), via Bread & Puppet Theater.
There is something about puppetry that is universal, and which makes it an access point for marginalized groups to critique the powers of the world. Daniel Loyola, leader of the Trazmallo Ixinti Company, which has done mask-making workshops with indigenous communities in Mexico, summarizes the importance of this artform expertly: “Puppets and masks are objects that we charge with power to re-enchant the world: to heal collective wounds or to build playful foundations for everyday life.”5
My teenage scheme to obtain free candy may bear little resemblance to the anti-war and anti-imperialist activism of puppeteers like Loyola and Schumann. But my own small protest demonstrated something that is true of protest culture overall: that it must operate with limited autonomy, within certain material constraints, which the impulse to question and challenge authority must overcome. Protest necessarily relies on the tools that are accessible — such as water, flour, and paper.
Total This and That Circus (2013, photo by Mark Dannenhauer), via Bread & Puppet Theater.
- Ronald T. Simon and Marc Estrin, Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), 82; Marc Estrin, “The Sustainable Energy of the Bread & Puppet Theater: Lessons Outside the Box,” Radical Teacher 89 (2011): 21 (quotation).
- Simon and Estrin, Rehearsing with Gods, 236; Estrin, “Sustainable Energy,” 30 (first quotation); Helen Brown and Jane Seitz, “With the Bread & Puppet Theatre: An Interview with Peter Schumann,” TDR 12 (Winter 1968): 62–73 (second quotation on 70). For an example of Bread & Puppet’s influence, see Sandy Spieler’s acknowledgement in Coleen J. Sheehy, ed., Theatre of Wonder: 25 Years in the Heart of the Beast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), viii.
- Christian Dupavillon, Bread and puppet theatre: spectacles en noir et blanc (Paris: Les Loges, 1978), 7; Simon and Estrin, Rehearsing with Gods, 12.
- Quoted in Simon and Estrin, Rehearsing with Gods, 198.
- Daniel Loyola, “Trazmallo Ixinti and applied puppetry in Mexico: An interview,” Applied Theatre Research 8 (July 2020): 153–60.