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Two Weeks with Bread & Puppet Theater: Part V 12/16/2003 8:45:53 PM
Feet: Clothed and Unclothed 1
Because I work in mime and dance, I have become acustomed to performing barefoot. However, doing so every single night for two weeks on a floor that often has dirt and other debris has left me with blisters on my heels, thicker calluses, minor cuts on the bottoms of my big toes, and deeper grooves and crevasses in the soles that refuse to give up their impacted dirt to all but the most intense scrubbing.
There is however one point during the show when we are all expected to take off our shoes (or in my case, a beat up and soon to be retired pair of 1460Z Doc Martens boots) and so I must put them on at one point. Because of the scene shifts during the Oratorio I have to be mindful of the best time to do it and also be consistent as to where I leave my shoes in a backstage area brimming with costumes, props, puppets, masks and performers waiting to go back on stage.
After after a few nights of performing as one of the fighting body parts, I get in the habit of having putting my boots back on immediately after I lean the high arm of the sleeper puppet against a wall during the paradise scene. I never see this scene, but I know that it involves a number of animal puppets, five of which will return in a latter act. When I return to the stage, it is with a cowbell in one hand and a drumstick in another; I am a percussionist in the Possibilitarian Orchestra and our selection is "The Enemy of Nature Symphony."
We walk onto the stage in our Bread & Puppet whites and assemble in a a rough semicircle: percussion on stage right, wind instruments on stage left, Lydia roughly in the center with her accordion. To the most extreme left stand Strawberry and Cathy with texts in their hands. Peter Schumann walks onto the stage and announces that the text is from a book by Joel Kovel entitled "The Enemy of Nature."
Kovel, from my brief skimming of a few passages from the book, is something of a Marxist influenced thinker who sees global capitalism as the most pathological embodiment of something he calls the Enemy of Nature system, one which reorders the world into resources, material, and commodities to be consumed and mobilized as need be. I recognize a strain of Heideggerian thought and sure enough, Martin Heidegger's analysis of technology as a means of interpreting the modern era is referenced a great deal in the index.
Schumann walks about, holds the book up to each member of the orchestra, and we each acknowledge the book with brief honks, scronks, crashes, thumps, thuds, and buzzes from our instruments. Intense under the brim of his black porkpie hat, Schumann begins to conduct the improvised symphony. Using eye contact and hand gestures, Schumann directs a player to play or to be silent. We learn to read his body language quickly. Over the course of the show, the improvisations become more and more interesting as the various brass and read instruments start to develop a shared vocabulary of sounds, and it starts to sound more like one of Sun Ra's compositions than the cacophony of the first few nights. Schumann silences the instruments at points and directs Cathy and Strawberry to read the Kovel text, sometimes alone, sometimes in unison, and sometimes in a fugue. Other times he makes them repeat single words or phrases, or cuts them off suddenly to have the orchestra play more. Way up in the balcony, at more subtle moments, Schumann directs a section of the orchestra to ruffle newspapers. We generally end on the comic sound of an old car horn played by Taran, take our bows and exit, place our instruments back stage and reappear for the act entitled "The University of Hands and Feet."
