Bread and Puppet Theater of Vermont Visits Austin for Two Performances, November 18, 2018 at 2 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.

Nov 18th,  2018 pm and 5:30pm, suggested donation, in the parking lot of the Museum of Human Achievement, between Springdale and Lyons

Austin Cultural Exchange and MoHA present: 
Bread and Puppet Theater

 

 

Bread & Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Its shows are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper maché and cardboard. Founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City's Lower East Side, the theater has been based in the North East Kingdom of Vermont since the early 1970s.

 

2 pm - The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus is a large-scale puppet spectacle that explains and teaches riot and rebellion against intolerable situations with the help of state of the art paper-maché weaponry and the appropriately riotous Bread and Puppet Brass Band. 
 
B&P director, Peter Schumann, says of The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus: “Tigers roar, apes drum their chests, horses neigh, and celestial grasshoppers teach ICE agents the basics steps of grasshopper rebellion dancing. A paradise investigation team analyses the earthlings’ relationship to paradise, while major representatives of Mother Earth attend a festive Puerto Rican dance of liberation from natural and political disaster.”
 
After the performance Bread and Puppet will serve its famous free sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread and Puppet’s “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press – will be for sale. 

Bread and Puppet comes to Austin as part of a rare 14 week tour across the continent and back with The Grasshopper Rebellion Circus and two other programs.

 

5:30 pm - The Basic Bye-bye Show is a manifesto on transformation inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts and the daily news. 


The Basic Byebye Show expands on the traditional byebyes of funerals and train stations by turning byebye-saying into a political act. It helps us say byebye to the gun –as a practical tool for massacre-making, as a symbol of "freedom," as an instrument of political influence and as an economic dependency. The show mourns the victims of gun massacres and turns this mourning toward the transformative political possibility of saying byebye to the gun once and for all. 

"The Basic Byebye Show originally set out to define and illuminate the need for basicbyebyes in our culture, but has progressed to respond to the event of regular mass shootings, in particular the recent massacre in the Florida high school”, says director Peter Schumann. “The theme is the birth of the gun by the 2nd Amendment Holy Cow, presided over by James Madison, which leads to the routine occurrence of horror and ends with the funeralization of that ill-conceived symbol of a free people.”

Complimentary beverages provided by Austonian Spirits.