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Two Weeks with Bread & Puppet Theater: Part I 12/12/2003 2:51:21 PM
The first of a series of reflections of my time working with Bread & Puppet Theater during a two week run in November of 2003. These have been written in the days and weeks following the production. They are not always chronological. They sometimes go over the same material in greater or lesser detail. The experience was profound for me and writing has been a way for me to discover what I have learned. I will describe aspects of the stage shows and what it was like to perform them as well as how I chose to interpret the roles I was assigned, other times I may reflect on the experience back stage and off stage. I may later edit these individual blogs into a continuous narrative. Feedback from others involved in this or other Bread & Puppet productions would be appreciated. Thanks
First Night of Rehearsals:
I show up on Monday, November 10. Mary Curtin, the producer, walks up to me the moment I enter the lobby and quickly asks "Alto, soprano, tenor, or bass?" I say "bass, I guess" and she leads me into the auditorium. She has a word with Peter Schumann. I recognize him from the documentaries. He's sixty nine years old, with a beard and a messy mop of silver hair, dressed in denim jeans and red flannel. He has similar bodily proportions to me: about the same height, trunk just a little longer than average, legs just a little shorter. He smiles and asks me the same question in a German accent. When I say "bass" he sends me up to the balcony, where some men are already singing in a circle. they hand me a page of sheet music. It's a a medieval Latin hymn entitled "Tantum Ergo Sacramentum" and I am told later that it is in a Corsican dialect. The song will plague me throughout the production. The bass line is so different from the other lines in the song, that I find myself veering off and doubling the nearest tenor if I am not right next to one of the basses in the scenes in which we sing it. Furthermore, since it is a modal song, it sounds quite odd to ears trained in modern western harmony. I keep having trouble with the low C. I am later told that the song is in the key of D and it figures that I would want to resolve a flat seventh immediately rather than sustain it.
I'm far better than I once was, but I am still not much of a singer.
We are then gathered around on the floor of the auditorium and introduce ourselves. The cast is a collection of people: the eight puppeteers of the touring company (including Schumann himself) some B&P veterans who now live in Boston and Cambridge, students (mostly from Emerson College), a few teenagers, some local performers (such as myself) who decided that they wanted to experience B&P.
Parts are doled out at this point by raising of hands. I get to be a body part-- one of two arms. We practice assembling the body into a single puppet on the stage. It takes ten of us to form the body of the reclining figure of a giant sleeper from these large brown paper mache panels. Turns out that I have one of the more physically demanding body parts as I have to stand over the puppeteers playing the head and the lower arm while keeping one hand on the connecting hand and forearm puppet. All of us synch our breathing, and try to bring our respective puppets to move in unison with the trunk's "breathing" rising and falling in an exagerated manner. Other puppeteers throw a sheet over us while Schumann and the remaining puppeteers discuss a pulley system. Soon we hear the screeching of wheels above us and a puppet of similar size and manufacture rises from behind the curtain up stage of us and ascends towards the ceiling like a giant marionette. It seems to take at least seven puppeteers to control it. Peter Schumann gives directions while the pulley operators try to coordinate their operations, eventually making the flying puppet pull the sheets off of the sleeper puppet. We disperse.
Another part for which I am cast is as an animal handler. I am to lead a woman under a lion mask out to the stage for a "separation of body and soul" operation. She doesn't seem to be enjoying herself and never comes back to rehearsal. I am working with a new lion the next day.
Most of the other scenes we play through that first night don't involve costuming, masks, or puppets, but I find myself playing a cowbell and in several acting parts. I am given one line to memorize:
"Hands, which have been taken from citizens in favor of digital systems, must be returned to their owners in an improved condition."
