Monday, January 26, 2009

Bread and Puppet Theater Return to Boston


Beginning January 26th and running through February 1st the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) presents the Bread and Puppet Theater’s Sourdough Philosophy Spectacle & Circus. Performances, Art Exhibit, and Cheap Art Sale all held in the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St., South End, Boston. For advance tickets, log onto www.theatermania.com or call 866-811-4111.

Back by popular demand, the award-winning Bread and Puppet Theater, featuring Artistic Director Peter Schumann and his troupe of 8 Vermont puppeteers, returns for a third year to the Cyclorama bringing their signature powerful imagery, masked characters, and giant papier-mâché puppets. The Bread and Puppet touring company, for this residency at the Cyclorama, includes Schumann, along with Danny McNamara, Maura Gahan, Greg Corbino, Diana Sette, Maryann Colella, Federica Collina, Cavan Meese, and Susie Perkins.

The Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally recognized company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art that is filled with music, dance and slapstick. Their shows are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of papier-maché and cardboard, a brass band for accompaniment, and anti-elitist singing and dance. Most are morality plays — about how people act toward each other — whose prototype is "Everyman." There are puppets of all kinds and sizes, masks, sculptural costumes, paintings, buildings and landscapes that seemingly breathe with Schumann's distinctive visual style of dance, expressionism, dark humor and low-culture simplicity.