The National Circus & Passion Of The Correct Moment at the Theatre for the New City

The Bread and Puppet Theatre Company presents The National Circus & Passion Of The Correct Moment, by Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Company, at the Theatre For The New City from the 8 - 23 Dec 2005.

The National Circus & Passion Of The Correct Moment: A two-part evening, beginning with a circus. It's a prologue, with half a dozen little acts including The Rotten Idea Theater Company (populated with 'Kaspers' - fresh, insurrectionist, Punch-type characters), a 'Russian Computer Dance,' and a tongue-in-cheek playlet on what makes a protest.

Schumann borrows the structure of the Passion Play for the second--and longer--part. The idea is to dramatize the mind of post-9/11 America, with its yearning for retaliation, as a puppet epic, all done without a word of dialogue.

The Passion play juxtaposes the ideology of today, with its antecedent in ancient Babylonia. In the ancient portion, there are two old kings of Mesomotamia and Babylon, boasting to each other in historical Babylonian texts about the shock and awe tactics of their time. The texts are serious, but the scene is thoroughly comic (one dancer's weapon is a fly swatter).

When the tableau morphs to modern times, it has table-sitting executives (with huge white cuffs), a screaming chorus, and corpses flying overhead. The latter re-form into airplanes as a metaphor of ultimate revenge. Airplanes made of bodies fly into buildings made of bodies. Iraqi women collect the corpses. But there is hope: the airplanes morph into birds, who pick up the pots and pans of political protest and an insurrection dance starts. All is done without a word of dialogue; there are only constructions and dances.

The Puppets have been designed and created by Peter Schumann.

Bread and Puppet, founded by Peter Schumann in 1962 on the Lower East Side, is now an internationally recognized company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art. Its shows are political and spectacular, with huge puppets made of paper mach� and cardboard; a brass band for accompaniment, and anti-elitist dance. Most are morality plays--about how people act toward each other--whose prototype is "Everyman." Their overall theme is universal peace.

Bread and Puppet productions use music, dance and slapstick. Their puppets of all kinds and sizes, masks, sculptural costumes, paintings, buildings and landscapes all evidence Schumann's distinctive visual style of dance, expressionism, dark humor and low-culture simplicity.