Earthling rescue crews, a journey with drums + horns, & a bleating sheep

Bread + Puppet Theater, Inflammatory Earthling Rants (With Help from Kropotkin). Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square South & Thompson Wednesday, 12th April 2023.

Bread + Puppet Theater, Inflammatory Earthling Rants (With Help from Kropotkin).

I  approached the venue for tonight, knowing where I was when I spotted a converted school bus with the words “Bread + Puppet.” I was near the side door as were a growing number of cast members. 

Soon after, several of them emerge, all wearing white, to stride into Washington Square Park, certainly intending to lead a procession to come to Judson Memorial Church to see the show. The weather is absolutely beautiful today, very warm for early spring (80 F as the show is to begin). 

On that Wednesday evening, the legendary activist church hosted the Bread + Puppet Theater on their 60th anniversary tour. This year’s show is titled Inflammatory Earthling Rants (With Help from Kropotkin).

This show for me serves a sort of bookend. I last saw the troupe in this location just days before lockdown three years earlier. With deep anticipation I’m sure this iteration will be quite the eye-opening experience.

If we as artists and supporters of artists are to understand art as democracy, then we must look for examples of work happening in person, in the flesh. Ideally, available in a public way. For the Bread + Puppet Theater to offer consistently free performances and free bread is a vivid example of democracy as an act. Critical in making democracy possible - and in no way I’m talking about voting, at least not primarily - is in being able to create freely and without the need for greed or profit or promoting violence, poverty or war.  This  democracy that believes in our needs being free drives stories full of the works of organizations like Bread and Puppet and their contemporaries the Diggers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, inspiring others in creative struggle.

A bleak scenescape was set upstairs on the stage. Images in shades of black on white sheets of cloth as big as sails populated the entire stage.

As usual, musical instruments are emerging from different parts of the stage: trumpet on stage right on a covered piano, snare drum on stage left behind one of the ominous sails.

The opening music was provided by a band consisting of euphonium, trumpet, tuba, and a bass drum with a cymbal attached. Their set is deeply rooted in the street/protest band tradition, with but one highlight being their variations the legendary nueva trova of Quilapayún’s “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido” (The  People United  Will Never Be Defeated), and its unforgettable and still-deeply relevant refrain.

Later in the show, more sounds were to emerge. The stage for a moment was flooded with a kazoo chorus. At another point, there was even a detuned autoharp.

For those unfamiliar with Bread + Puppet Theater, their performances are strongly rooted in the moment, especially in issues that affect the masses yet brutally pushed aside by mainstream media. That brutality, as well the hope for change, is at the core of their performance. A listing in the program for President Biden’s Budget Proposal for Fiscal Year 2024 as one of the “excerpts” for the show’s text juxtaposes platitudes with the pain. Specifically, Inflammatory Earthling Rants … focuses on the links that indeed inflame. War, environmental destruction, oppression at the US-Mexico border, and police brutality are centered in the words spoken and choreographed. 

As for Biden’s proposal for the border? The answer cited is more border patrol agents and staff, and more dehumanizing responses to asylum seekers, 

Little wonder that, earlier in the ontological segment, performers wearing cards that read “WE.DO.EXIST.” were in a clash of words with a cardboard puppet that emphatically believes “NOT.”

Amid the chants, stomping, and oral expressions were sung voices both ethereal and otherworldly. One female voice was the perfect match for the larger-than-life puppets at one point occupying the stage. 

Then hope came. Brought out from behind a giant puppet was a placard with a written acknowledgement  that, in the increasingly violent notorious planned “Cop City” outside of Atlanta, activists there have stopped it from being active for 11 months. 

Critical to remember that there was no love for Biden here. In  fact, just the opposite: an reminder that we face worsening conditions no matter who is head of state. Rather, as was shown tonight, the potential for change is in music, the written word, “Earthling rescue crews,” and a bleating sheep with a message of its own.

The lyrical minimalism (and the centering of dance) is meant to convey the complexities of politics of greed and lake capitalism that 60 years since the theater was founded. All has been part of a long process in the permanent decline. Crime and homelessness only become issues only because they become affective smokescreens to the damage done by the state and their corporate backers.  

For those unfamiliar with the life and work of Peter Kropotkin, you will go away having learned about what was at the core of his anarchist beliefs. Excerpts from Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, or read aloud to punctuate some of the parts. 

The crowd was huge enough that in the front row more attendees sat on the floor. So many more than expected to experience the deconstruction of the notion of “survival of the fittest” as a group exercise. The show was also reminder that while history is frequently taught about those who make war, we have yet to hear the stories of peacemaking. 

A huge lesson tonight is to think: amid all the screeching against Marx and Marxism by imperialist lackeys of all kinds, get ready for a blank stare if you say Kropotkin.

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