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Bread & Puppet: The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus
The circus is coming! The circus is coming! The Bread & Puppet Theater returns to Des Moines, Iowa with its iconic circus on Wednesday, September 25, 2024 at 7pm. The Woodland Realm and Group Creative Services present the company at Water Works Park’s Lauridsen Amphitheater for The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus, a brand new show in the tradition of the iconic Bread & Puppet Circuses that began at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont in 1970.
The show draws on traditional circus tropes and familiar Bread and Puppet iconography to highlight urgent issues of the day. Stilt dancers, paper maché beasts of all sizes and a riotous brass band make a raucous, colorful spectacle of protest and celebration. After each show Bread & Puppet will serve its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press – will be for sale.
Director Peter Schumann describes the show as featuring, “tigers teaching the congress of cowards how to jump over billionaires and acquire the courage to not pay for the atrocities of the latest genocide; the proverbial sheep of the system refusing to be sheep and committing revolution against the system; and the blue horses of the peace and harmony terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population and then galloping over the ruins of the truth industry.”
Now in its 61st year, Bread & Puppet will tour to some of its regular fall stops including New York, Cambridge, and Philadelphia, as well as to new locations including Reading, PA; Chicago, IL; and Bloomington, IN. In all, Bread & Puppet will play the circus 37 times across 16 states. The full tour schedule is available at BreadAndPuppet.org/Tour.
BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER
The Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Believing that theater is a basic necessity like bread, the company frequently brings its work to the streets for those who may not otherwise go to the theater. Its shows are political and spectacular, with puppets often on stilts, wearing huge masks with expressive faces, singing, dancing and playing music.
Bread and Puppet is recognized throughout the world and has won distinction at international theater festivals in Italy, Poland, Colombia, and Yugoslavia, beginning with their break-out performances at the 1968 Nancy Festival in France. Notable awards include the Erasmus Prize of Amsterdam, 4 Obies, the Puppeteers of America's President Award, and the Vermont Governor's Award. Bread and Puppet is constantly active, performing at its farm in Glover, VT, and in local churches, schools and parades. It regularly tours Europe, Canada, and the United States and has recently visited El Salvador, Haiti, Russia, and Korea.
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 and is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.
https://breadandpuppet.org/
Event Links
Facebook: https://go.evvnt.com/2634910-0
