upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

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Bread & Puppet Theater’s Basic Bye-Bye Show in Philly at the Icebox

In The Basic Bye-Bye Show a series of quiet object fantasies unfolds in black, white, and grey inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words—"Resist," "Bread," "Yes," "Sky," "Riot," "Bye-Bye." Outside, an orchestra of nonsense instruments arises, spins, and recedes. A birch forest grows. Sculpted clouds produce hands, chairs, and rain. The storm passes. The episodes that make up The Basic Bye-Bye Show develop in abstract counterpoint to periodic handkerchief-assisted "basic bye-byes" to various brutal unnecessities of our current politics.

Bread & Puppet director Peter Schumann says of the show: "The Basic Bye-Bye Show is based on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet—which is why our show proclaims the Possibilitarian's basic bye-bye to capitalism in order to welcome the 1000 alternatives to this rotten system."

Show runs just over an hour with no intermission. Admission is sliding scale $10–20 at the door, kids $5. Bread & Puppet's Cheap Art Sale will be open after the show. Bread and aioli shall be served.

Sunday, April 8 at 7 PM - 8 PM at the Icebox

 

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. Annual presentations for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Memorial Day often included children and adults from the community as participants. Many performances were done in the street. 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. The 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets. Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a two day outdoor festival of puppetry shows, was presented annually through 1998.

The company makes its income from touring new and old productions  both on the American continent and abroad, and from sales of Bread and Puppet Press’ posters and publications. The traveling puppet shows range from tightly composed theater pieces presented by members of the company, to extensive outdoor pageants which require the participation of many volunteers.

Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.

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