Bread and Puppet is one of the longest-running non-profit making, self-supporting theatre companies in the USA, remarkable for its large-scale work produced with volunteers. It grew from the weekly puppet shows given in the early 1960s in a loft in New York’s Lower East Side, by the recent emigrants from Germany Peter Schumann and his wife Elka. Born in Silesia in 1934, Shumann became a refugee in Schleswig-Holstein with his family, where their life involved making sourdough rye bread baked in a communal bakery. As a child Schumann and his brothers and sisters also created puppet shows for any occasion.

Originally called the Moosach Puppet Theatre and People Puppet Theatre, the Schumanns took their show on the road in a trailer converted as a mobile puppet theatre, staging impromptu performances in New England. Back in New York City in 1963 the Schumanns converted the Delancey Street loft into a theatre and puppet museum where Bread and Puppet Theatre gained its name, referencing Schumann’s custom of sharing with his audience members sourdough bread baked by him. The company’s early work in New York City ranged from children’s puppet shows to the large-scale outdoor pageants and street shows of 1964, 1965 and 1966 in the poorest areas of the city addressing urban, political and social issues, and protesting about the war in Vietnam, using massive moving sculptures or twenty-foot tall puppets. Their 1968 anti-Vietnam war show Fire led to performances abroad, at a festival in France in 1968, and in June 1969 at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

The Schumanns moved to Plainfield, Vermont in 1970 where Goddard College offered them a theatre residency. They started performing in a field at Cate Farm on the Goddard campus where their first summer show Our Domestic Resurrection Circus: ‘like a history of America, ending in Vietnam’ embraced carnival and circus and featured the enormous puppets that characterised their work. The large puppet depicted on this poster represents The Virgin Mary, a sorrowing mother puppet who frequently appeared in their work as a Grey Lady. This poster possibly advertised the circus in 1973 when the donor John Casson was working with them on the summer circus at Cate Farm, Vermont, making masks and puppets.

In 1975 the Company moved to Glover where the landscape provided them with a natural amphitheatre in an old gravel pit allowing them to perform large scale outdoor productions without amplification. Their vast and moving spectacles resulted in huge crowds gathering annually, but after 1998 the Circus was succeeded by a summer programme and touring productions addressing issues of the day, and still featuring their astonishing and moving sculptural creations.