Peter Schumann, the grizzled godfather of modern grass-roots political puppetry, is doing his famous Fiddle Talk at Wesleyan University next Monday—7 p.m. on April 9 at the school’s Center for the Arts CFA Hall. Details here.
It’s a rare chance to see Schumann speak in Connecticut. The progressive theater legend has been based in Northern Vermont since 1970 with the Bread & Puppet collective he began a decade earlier in New York City.
Rare, but not unprecedented. Schumann did the Fiddle Talk—his unique solo distillation of the Bread & Puppet aesthetic, with little of the pageantry but all of the charm—at the very first International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 1996. His very appearance at the fest, which also involved a Bread & Puppet performance on New Haven Green, was extremely meaningful to the arts-savvy and suggested that Arts & Ideas was operating on the highest levels it could reach. That first A&I festival featured a host of important artists from around the world, and Schumann (who might have travelled the least to get to New Haven) was the one they flocked to see. I remember sitting near the director and erstwhile puppeteer Peter Sellars (a onetime festival director himself, of the L.A. Festival) and seeing him just enthralled by Schumann.
The point being, both then in New Haven and next week at Wesleyan, that booking Bread & Puppet is incredibly cool, but getting Peter Schumann himself is ineffably cooler.
The man is one of the great theater thinkers of the last century. There’s very little street theater or political puppetry around today that’s not in his debt. As a performer, he’s low-key, but as an artist and agitator he’s monumental.
My father, Peter Arnott, performed Greek tragedy with marionettes and toured Vermont regularly, which brought him into contact with Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet. The company would put my father up at their farm in Glover, Vt.—an invitation he never declined, though their back-to-the-land ways ruffled his British gourmet sensibilities. I think my father would have greatly enjoyed a chance to see Peter Schumann perform in a tidy, well-kept hall like the CFA rather than in Bread & Puppet’s charmingly scruffy barn or field venues. You should too. In fact, you should never miss a chance to see Schumann anywhere, anytime.