Rehearsing With Gods

Friday, November 10, 2006

Rehearsing With Gods, by Marc Estrin, with photographs by Ronald T. Simon

By john burns

Publish Date: 2-Dec-2004

Rehearsing with Gods

It was a close race on election night in tiny Glover County. Final tally: 285 Kerry, 246 Bush. It's hard to know how the votes might have gone if the fabulous freaks and philosophers of the Bread & Puppet Theater hadn't settled in the area way back in 1970, attracted by rural Vermont's simplicity and authenticity. But settle they did, founder Peter Schumann and his family and friends and followers, with summer visits from thousands of audience members yearning to join the retreat into a mythically set-dressed quest for less: less artificial materials for the huge striking puppets, less engagement with the distractions of modernity.

"The theater's style seemed then to modulate into something less confrontational--wider, perhaps deeper, but far more obscure," long-time puppeteer Marc Estrin writes in Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater. "Activists decried it as a retreat from burning issues into mystical, abstract, inaccessible, and selfindulgent privacy--in one writer's estimate, 'somnolent.'" What they were fleeing, during Vietnam, was not just a hard-right militocracy but a systemic enslavement to competition and capitalism. Nowadays, they'd marry Canadians.

Estrin's thoughtful analysis is neither history nor criticism but a digesting of a lifetime spent in service to the peculiar, dramatic, difficult vision of an artist he's content to call genius: Schumann is "likely the only sixteenthcentury human stalking the planet Earth today. His art is of that time, as is his thinking. For what sane mind these days is swirling with gods and demons and swimming among archetypes?" As such, Rehearsing splays across reminiscence, analysis, and puzzlement. There's too little description of individual shows (though how would you choose one from thousands?), but he does recall the reality of performing inside those wondrous/monstrous creations of clay, straw, and beer: "To be a goat: hot, itchy burlap dress--not so bad. Having to play cello standing up--while twirling--not so bad. But the goat head--a heavy sculpture three feet up a long neck fastened securely to my head and around my jaw....But then there's puppeteer macho--you don't complain."

Between his scholarly reconsideration of B&PT and Montrealer Ronald Simon's reverential large-scale black-and-white photographs, Rehearsing With Gods is a singular document about a singular response to times that haven't a-changed.