"Snow and puppets" by Foss Forward I traveled to Glover, Vt., last weekend to visit my friends Heather and Davi.
Glover is a small town of about 1,000, approximately 40 minutes from Canada. It is the home of Bread & Puppet Theatre, an activist puppet troupe founded in the 1960s and known for an anti-war, pro-worker message; Heather and Davi happened to be renting a small wooden house owned by the founder and director of Bread & Puppet, Peter Schumann, and his wife, Elka. During the summer, the troupe performs regularly at the farm owned by Peter and Elka, but during the winter the property is fairly quiet, and with good reason: During my 48-hour stay, it snowed approximately five times. “Does it snow every day here?” I asked, because I was beginning to feel a bit like I was trapped inside a snow globe. “Pretty much,” Heather said. The inside of Davi and Heather’s house was quite cozy; a small wood stove occupied the center of the room, a piano sat in the corner and the wall was lined with books ranging from Dr. Seuss to Franz Kafka. For a rental property, the house contained a surprising amount of art: paintings and drawings and prints (Bread & Puppet operates a small press, which produces posters, postcards and books), many of which featured thoughtful and inspiring messages. During my stay, I jotted down some of these messages, which included: “Discipline the body, creatively” (written on a painting of a dancer) “If the economy collapses we still have each other” (printed on a dark background) “You don’t need a mason to make potato salad” (written above a drawing of an old woman’s face) On Sunday morning, Heather suggested we snowshoe down to the Bread & Puppet Museum, down the road from Heather and Davi’s house. “When is it open?” I asked. “We can just let ourselves in and turn on the lights,” she explained. I don’t know what I expected from the Bread & Puppet Museum, but it was a much wilder place than I anticipated, and its slogan — “one of the biggest collections of some of the biggest puppets in the world!” — doesn’t quite do it justice, although I did like the short synopsis printed on the museum brochure, and these two sentences in particular: “And, naturally, all this will decay in due course” and “And since this Museum replaces the traditional museum’s ideal of preservation with acceptance of more or less graceful and inevitable deterioration, consider making your visit sooner rather than later.” The museum occupies a former dairy barn, and contains thousands of puppets, mobiles, drawings, prints and masks, crammed into the bays and stalls and grouped according to theme, color and size. Some of the puppets recreate scenes from old shows produced by Bread & Puppet, while others form entirely new scenes. One display is a tribute to janitors and washerwomen, another is a dark and haunting Holocaust story. Heather is a sculptor, and the odd and eerie beauty of the puppets prompted her to observe, “If I could make a sculpture as good as some of these puppets, I would be happy.” For what it’s worth, the museum brochure describes Schumann’s style as “a prodigious mix of Romanesque, German Expressionism, Cycladic Minimalism and Potato-nose Naturalism.” I have no idea what that means. But I do know that the museum is really cool. For some images, click here. To enter my Oscar contest, click here. Got a comment? E-mail me at [email protected]. -- http://www.dailygazette.com/weblogs/foss/2011/feb/15/snow-and-puppets/ Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
