Apropos of my post yesterday about community engagement, the term has so recently been bandied about as something arts organizations should aspire to, it is easy to forget that it isn’t a new idea.

Bread and Puppet, for example, turns 50 this year. They started out in the streets, in the community giving people bread alongside the performances and involving members of the community in their performance.

They may be viewed as agitprop rabble rousers, but the philosophy founder Peter Shumann espouses about his work pretty much parallels the current thought about how the arts should be integral to a community:

“We give you a piece of bread with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking, eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show or we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual.

Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto, written 20 years ago, further echoes current sentiments about the value of art.

Cheap Art is not an easy life style though. While the group has endured for 50 years, they haven’t amassed a fortune in the process. From what I have read over the years, their work is fueled as much by passion and sweat today as it was 50 years ago.

The article I link to about the 50th anniversary, suggests Schumann doesn’t feel he has made the impact he had hoped.

While it probably isn’t in the direction Schumann had hoped, his work did have an impact on me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 80s, Bread and Puppet was invited to work with the students to create a performance. If I recall correctly, the piece was protesting the destruction brought about by damming a river to build a hydroelectric plant.

But what impressed me was Schumann’s ability to improvise his show according to the facilities and number of people he had available. My conception of plays to that point was based in the execution of concrete set of lines, stage directions and set pieces.

I recall that the school hadn’t been able to recruit the number of students he had asked for. I thought Schumann would be angry—again based on the idea that shows required a specific number of people. But he and his team just made do and we got an opportunity to work with those great larger than life puppets. The result was pretty visually interesting. (Yeah, I know he didn’t invent improvised performance and the revelation would have certainly come at some point.)

I didn’t go on to protest the construction of environmentally unfriendly projects, but I do still have a poster and the experience has informed programming decisions I have made.

I presented long time Bread and Puppet collaborator, Paul Zaloom at one point. And my college experience with Bread and Puppet was the basic inspiration for a site specific work I commissioned in conjunction with another performance group to provide a similar experience to another set of students. A fair bit of the work I have done in recent years has been about providing a venue for local artists to give voice to elements of their community.

I am sure the memory of that one weekend working with Bread and Puppets has contributed to my conviction about the value of the arts as practice and experience.

At some point in our lives, maybe we all need an encounter with a madman with wild hair who comes with challenging ideas in one hand and a loaf of bread offered in the other.

I was about to suggest that it would be good to sometimes be that madman for our communities, but I realized it takes experience to make the product in both hands palatable.