BREAD & PUPPET, VERMONT. PART 2

Welcome back to the Bread & Puppet farm. If you haven't read Part One, I'd strongly suggest you do before going on, because this is the kind of place that requires a LOT of context to get your head around...

Like any good leftist space, meetings are paramount. There is a morning meeting after breakfast six days week, where chores are assigned, notices are given, and sub-committees are set up. Because it's also a puppet theatre, this led to some of the funniest serious discussions I've ever witnessed. Now, Bread & Puppet keeps up a fairly relentless schedule of appearances at local parades and protests, and a favourite at all of these is Pinky the elephant. I was missing this crucial context when I heard one of the puppeteers raise their hands at one morning meeting and say very seriously: "We don't have anyone to be Pinky's backside today." Pinky's missing arse then became a subject of quite fierce logistical debate, until two of our Print Shop group stepped in to save the day, one as bum and one as trainer.

The heroes of the hour.

Our fellow apprentices returned exhausted; being Pinky's rear end requires spending hours holding up a heavy wooden frame whilst under a blanket. Being a puppeteer is tough going, incidentally - every puppet I picked up was a workout. Given this happened a couple of times out of a misplaced sense of gallantry, it also led to some immediately humbling realisations that the person half my size I was trying to "help" was, in fact, much much stronger than me.

Pinky is instructive when thinking about what Bread & Puppet do, and why their presence matters at protests and in online resistance circles. There's something about puppets that cuts through a debate, that brings joy and magic to protest and stops it being completely po-faced. There are so many (cliché alert) terrible things happening at the moment, in the States, in the UK and around the world, that finding ways to resist in a way that captures people's imagination feels more important than ever. It's why the boat video, surreal as it felt to be a part of, does work in its own way. It cuts through the serious addresses to camera or harrowing on the ground footage on people's feed, important as those can be. Plus I always think ridicule is a good tactic - it's hard to come across as the good guys if you're arresting a pink elephant for disturbing the peace. Or, say, hundreds of pensioners sitting on a lawn...

The puppets bite back.

The farm is a place where politics are lived and present, where Gaza and ICE raids are constantly discussed and burying your head in the sand is not an option. This is slightly at odds with it being so remote, of course, and Vermont being such a safe liberal environment in general. It would be easy to dismiss as Islington-in-the-Fields. But then again, this removal is also a kind of protest. On the farm, you live in a simpler way, the food is mostly grown on the farm or locally, the toilets are almost all outhouses, and most people on the farm are camping or sleeping in repurposed school buses. There's not a latte in sight - in fact, the raw milk that arrives once a week is one of the biggest luxuries going. Elke’s grandparents wrote an influential book about living with the land, and the farm does feel like a shining example of an alternative lifestyle, one that lives its values on a day-to-day basis. This feels even more significant in the U.S., where everything is precision engineered for your convenience, mass-made and retro-fitted to have taste and the illusion of substance. Hand milling the rye flour for Peter’s dense-ass bread felt like a welcome rebuttal to that, however small.

It's also not like the farm is totally isolated. Firstly, the yearly circus attracts literally thousands of people to Vermont every year. It's so big they actually had to rein it in from its heyday in the 80s and 90s because it became dangerously overcrowded. We're talking 80,000 people in this sleepy Vermont village for one weekend. Some say it was the precursor to Burning Man. Still today, with the circus spread over Sundays across the summer, each one will attract huge crowds. There's something refreshingly old school about this, something quite literally "bread & circuses" (I can't believe I didn't make this connection while I was there) - it taps into a primal need for entertainment and spectacle. We're talking huge banners, acrobats, and the tallest stilts you've ever seen. Incidentally, Peter was still going up until about five years ago; the pictures have to be seen to be believed.

One of our jobs on the apprenticeship was to print these giant poppy banners that will be used to create the illusion of a sea of poppies in the pageant field. Imagine living in a place with a pageant field... A word on the poppies: in the US, they are symbols of Palestinian resistance, which is interesting to experience as British people who have seen it become an increasingly vexed culture war battleground. It was hard to print a 10 foot poppy and not imagine it hanging outside the house of the worst man on your street, but the results are undeniably beautiful.

"So apparently in the UK there's a mania named after us"

Touring is also a big part of the theatre, and the Friday night show I was in for one night only will eventually be the one that tours across the States over autumn and winter - when it will be so cold in Vermont that the main farm house will be unusable. Engagement took more spontaneous forms as well - one puppeteer spent their precious "double day off" doing the five hour drive to and from New York to support students on hunger strike for Gaza. There was always this willingness to be part of the wider conversation. In this way B&P maintains its connection with the outside world - isolated and yet involved.

I’ll leave you with final illustration of how special the farm is. As you might expect from a community that’s been going sixty years, many of the members of Bread & Puppet have passed away over the years. This includes Elke herself, who died a couple of years ago. She is buried in a section of forest, a bit away from the farmhouse, called the “memorial grove”. There are little shrines to various members of the Bread & Puppet family here, in different forms; pictures, sculptures, letters, press cuttings, and hand-built huts, each remembering someone who played a special role in the history of the theatre or the farm.

Our time on the farm coincided with a New York playwright, who had recently lost her partner of many years. Her grief for him felt like a physical presence, impossible to ignore when you talked to her; in fact, she’s just written a book about it. On our initial tour of the farm, when we got to the grove, there she was, lying on the blanket of pine needles next to his tree, eyes closed, and hands folded on her stomach. Utterly at peace.

Walking around the memorial grove brought home how special Bread & Puppet is – a place where shared creativity creates a legacy, where protest, performance, and trying to live a different way create bonds for life, and beyond. We both want to go back there someday, but even if we don't, I felt like it relit a creative torch in me that I intend to carry forward. Even if it means you get served some extremely pungent aioli next time you're at our house.