Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theatre
returns to Philadelphia with DIAGONAL LIFE: THEORY & PRAXIS for 3
evenings and an afternoon at The Rotunda.
Four performances!
Thursday May 2 at 8pm
Friday May 3 at 8pm
Saturday May 4 at 8pm
Sunday May 5 at 3pm
We
inhabitants of Western modernity are no strangers to verticality, from
the architecture of our cities, to the "ladder(s) of success" we're
expected to scale, to the incessant wakefulness required of us,
postponing the horizontal pleasures of sleep. Bread and Puppet's
"Diagonal Life" presents the diagonal as a promising mode for opposition
to the dominating verticality of our civilization. Diagonal Life brings
all the bewildering, beguiling, and downright funny possibilities and
implications of diagonality to life with song, dance, magic, mechanism,
and stunning cardboard and paper maché puppets painted in Peter
Schumann's exuberant, slapdash expressionist style.
The
Bread & Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company
that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art
filled with music, dance, politics and spectacularly huge puppets.
Founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York's Lower East Side, the
theater has been based in rural Vermont since the early 70s. Schumann
remains the theater’s artistic director, making puppets for and
directing 10+ shows per year. Notable awards include the Erasmus Prize
of Amsterdam, four Obies, the Puppeteers of America's President Award,
and the Vermont Governor's Award.
Show runs 60 minutes and will be followed by the serving of bread and
aioli, plus cheap art from the Bread & Puppet Press. Tickets at the door are
$10–20 sliding scale ($5 for kids) with no one turned away.