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For World Puppetry Day: On Some Puppets, Pageants, Parades and Protests
It’s World Puppetry Day!
We haven’t written tons on puppetry per se to date on Travalanche; our “Ventriloquism and Puppetry” section is overwhelmingly lop-sided in favor of ventriloquism, although we have done a few on Jim Henson and the Muppets; Shari Lewis; Kukla, Fran and Ollie; and the Punch and Judy tradition. It’s the latter topic that comes closest to what we’ll be talking about today.
Only just yesterday, I mentioned a series of related posts cropping up over the next while, and this is one of those! Something about emerging from recent dark times, and the prospect of reviving some of my moribund performance activity, has put me in the headspace of revisiting roots, and don’t worry it’s all related to the variety and show business history I write about here. My authorship of the book No Applause, and this blog, arose out of the fact that I was producing vaudeville shows. And when I launched that activity in the mid’ 1990s, I called the company that would produce it “Mountebanks” — a concept with a Medieval origin. And you’ll recall that No Applause talks about some of the Medieval roots of variety entertainment. This series will be exploring that a bit.
The topic of this post was also pre-announced in another recent one. In this tribute to my late mother-in-law, I mentioned the IMF protests I had attended circa 2001, and some journalism I was doing in connection with them. One of the pieces I did quite a bit of work on was a planned long-form article about street theatre at protests. It was originally intended for American Theater Magazine, where I was an Affiliated Writing Fellow, but then 9/11 happened, and so I shifted gears on a dime and instead wrote a long piece about how theatres were responding to that tragedy. I did end up writing a couple of pieces about protest theatre in 2004, focused on the Iraq War and Bush’s re-election, which were published in The Village Voice and Reason.
Those still weren’t the piece I was planning, nor will this one be, though it will be much more like what I had in mind. The planned piece would have been comprehensive in covering all (or most of) the political protest and street theatre of the past century, including lots of contemporary companies. For me to ever undertake that piece at any time (I’ll just say the dirty words) would require pecuniary recompense. It interests me, but isn’t my top priority. To boot other stuff out of the way and focus exclusively on the topic would (ironically) require material incentive. I say “ironically” because, ahem (hippie voice): bread is evil, man! It causes all the wars! True, but in this case, it would also cause a research-heavy journalism project that I wouldn’t otherwise be undertaking. So today, we truncate and just hit some very key grace notes of the imagined étude.
In yesterday’s post about Rabelais and Gargantua we spoke of giants, so I love that I learned today that in the decades just prior to Rabelais’ birth there arose the tradition in Belgium and Northern France of those giant processional puppets for pageants and parades around Catholic feast days like Carnival, Corpus Christi, et al. These holiday celebrations were also characterized by costumes, masks, effigies, and floats with scenic elements on the back of wagons. In the age of Revolution (and literacy) signs were added to the mix, and the tradition retained its populist orientation, while veering away from religious themes and into political ones. Such demonstrations necessarily became involved with left wing movements. Lacking an official voice, the People took to the streets.
What’s always fascinated me about this phenomenon is its relationship to the theatre. It is spontaneous, often ad hoc spectacle which employs theatrical elements, not just sets and costumes and puppets, but also songs, speeches, coordinated movement, and sometimes even narratives, wordless or otherwise. I’m very interested in how this art form came to find a home in modern, post-war America. Two of the key figures in that resurrection, 60 years ago, are, astoundingly, still with us. I know much more about them than I otherwise might have through my long-term involvement with Theater for the New City over the decades.
German-born Peter Schumann (b. 1934) founded Bread and Puppet Theater on the Lower East Side with his wife Elka in 1963. 60 years ago! Their name (obviously, I hope) comes from their ethic of sharing free (or low cost) food and spectacles. Schumann had been a dancer and sculptor in his home country, Germany, whose other major export to the U.S. at the time, appropriately, was Volkswagens. How well they both go with peace signs! Anyway, dancing plus sculpting pretty much equals puppetry so Schumann’s resume was ideal for his new direction. He and his company have been based out of a commune in Vermont since 1970, living according to an ideal even rarer now than it was when Schumann started out. Bread and Puppet’s stark, primal and haunting images have graced protests and public spaces since the early days of the peace and Civil Rights movements. Bob Dylan’s muse and first love Suze Rotolo was an early company member. Other notable members have included performance artist Paul Zaloom, poet Grace Paley, Woman with a Beard Jennifer Miller of Circus Amok, and the founders of Great Small Works. Bread and Puppet Theater has been included in most decent American theatre history books since the time of Ronald Reagan, and Schumann’s still going strong. The company tours heavily every year, and one of their annual stops around the Holiday season for decades has been Theater for the New City.
There’s something Pagan about the holiday connection, and it’s top of mind as I pen this one day after the Spring Equinox. Which makes a perfect transition to:
Among the most powerful theatrical experiences I have ever had (and I have had it three times) were at the annual Halloween Procession of the Ghouls by the Mettawee River Theatre Company at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In a way, this work takes us full circle back to the origins of this kind of spectacle. It’s still a populist event, but it’s definitely connected to spirituality as opposed to politics. In Christian tradition, All Hallows Eve is when the dead are said to walk the earth again. In this ritual, the spectators witness a silent, spectral succession of of creatures emerge and pass through the church into the night. Puppetry allows many of them to fly and float above your heads. Other are devised with costume, mask and movement. Some are funny or cute, some are demonic and scary, some are sad, but in all cases the ritual creates a convincing experience of ghosts. It is truly amazing.
Mettawee was founded by Ralph Lee (b. 1935), whom as coincidence would have it, also has a Vermont connection (he was born there). Lee studied danced and theatre in Europe in the late ’50s, and returned to work on New York stages in the early ’60s. Starting in 1967 he became a member of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre, and worked at La Mama with playwrights like Leonard Melfi and Marie Irene Fornas. It was during this period when he became interested in design as well and began creating sets, masks and puppet elements for productions.
In 1974 he founded the Village Halloween Parade! You heard right. In the early years, Theater for the New City produced that parade, which is where I learned something about the founding. (For non-New Yorkers, the Village Halloween Parade is one of NYC’s biggest annual street events. It is an amazing experience).
In 1976 Lee founded the Mettawee River Theater Company, creating theatreworks involving puppetry that are produced in non-traditional locations, often parks and the like. Mettawee’s productions are generally based on myths and folk tales. They’re not political in the same way as Bread and Puppet, but there is a connection to nature and cross-cultural humanity which rates as a statement of its own kind. They are based in Salem, New York, on the Vermont border.
My friend Jim Moore of Vaudevisuals did a swell interview Mr. Lee. Check that out here.
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UConn in Storrs, CT currently has an exhibition up showcasing Lee’s work. It’s up throuugh May 28, 2023. Learn more about that here.
Parting rumination:
As I mentioned in my recent post on Arthur Lee, my mind was fully blown by that last scene in the first season of Russian Doll, because the mysterious nocturnal street parade reminded me of nothing so much as the work of that other Lee, Ralph Lee! The moment evokes both the Procession of the Ghouls and the Village Halloween Parade. I don’t know if he was involved, but it certainly seems inspired by him. That Natasha Lyonne, she has it on the ball.
For related reading, see:
For more on the Medieval roots of the variety arts, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.
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