Difficult Hope: An Ethnography of the Bread and Puppet Theater

Austin McCann

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

Second Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Vesperi, Maria

Keywords

Ethnography, Theater, Political Art

Area of Concentration

Anthropology

Abstract

This is an ethnography of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater, based in Glover, Vermont. Bread and Puppet is anomalous: this anti-capitalist "Cheap Art" organization has maintained its distinctive aesthetic and its radical independence for more than four decades. The theater is based on the charismatic authority of Peter Schumann, a German artist concerned with cultural revival in the face of political horror. Schumann's promulgation of the synergy of art and politics has serious implications for the reception and canonization of his work. My thesis interrogates Bread and Puppet's aesthetic, then turns inward to questions of structure. The ways in which the Bread and Puppet lifestyle is enforced as orthodoxy, the structural problems attendant to charismatic authority, the dialectic of meaningful and divisional labor: these are major concerns in my research. Lastly, the question of embodied knowing and learning becomes ethnographically vital, as I look into how the experiences of participants are shaped by, and in turn shape, the work. It begs the question: how did a poor puppet theater become one of the greatest "countercultural" projects of the past century?

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